From our inception 5 years ago, Pipedream Comics has been a huge advocate of the world of digital comics. So we were honoured to be contacted by a team at the British Library who were looking to investigate British Digital Comics and how they can be preserved and archived. But they need your help. So please read their statement below and find out how you can help preserve the world of UK digital comics for posterity!

A new project at the British Library is focusing on digital comics publishing in the UK, and the challenges of preservation and access in the long term.  Since April 2013, the British Library has been able to collect material published in the UK in digital form under Legal Deposit regulations. This change was intended to ensure that “born digital” publications, which can be at risk of loss, are preserved in the national collections of Legal Deposit Libraries (for more on Legal Deposit, please see http://www.bl.uk/aboutus/legaldeposit). However, digital comics can present challenges for collection and preservation over the long term – as they may be dependent on third-party platforms or plug-ins and otherwise may not be suitably gathered by web harvesting.    

To help understand these challenges better, the Library would like to make a collection of UK digital comics in a range of forms. Although these would not be accessible in Reading Rooms, they would support further analysis, to help define the systems and tools that the Library would need to preserve and present digital comics over the long term. In addition, we will be creating a Web Archive collection of UK digital comics’ websites, to provide context for understanding digital comics. 

In order for our work to be as comprehensive as possible, we are reaching out to creators and publishers of digital comics in the UK. We’d like to know more about the digital comics that you create, find out links to add to our Web Archive collection, and find examples of comic apps that we could collect.

For more information on this project, please email Jennifer.Aggleton@BL.uk. We will be accepting suggestions until the end of August 2017.