As it stands now, webcomics present challenges for the standard cataloguer. I decided to act as a layman approaching an expert to see how the professionals might tackle the problem of webcomics in their collections. I turned to the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University, the world’s pre-eminent institution for sequential art. Navigating to their Digital Collections webpage, immediately a blurb touts "The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum houses the world's largest collection of materials related to cartoons and comics, including original art, books, magazines, journals, comic books, graphic novels, archival materials, and newspaper comic strip pages and clippings" (Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum, n.d.). However, upon typing and entering "Octopus Pie" into the search bar, I yielded a grand total of zero results.

Navigating out of the Digital Collections and into Ohio State University’s Library Catalog, searching for Octopus Pie revealed several results, but they all pertained to the published, physical copies of the comic – and even then, the library’s holdings only covered a portion of the entire work. In its published form, Octopus Pie’s main story consists of five volumes published by Image Comics, and two smaller self-published books that represent the story’s epilogue. Billy Ireland’s library only contained the first volume from Image Comics, as well as two early volumes published by TopatoCo that were released before the webcomic completed its original run. It was hardly a complete representation of the work compared to its original, online form.

The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum clearly prioritized comics in a physical, bibliographic manifestation, so I decided to expand my lens to the Library of Congress. As luck would have it, the Library of Congress maintains a Webcomics Web Archive, developed in 2017 by the American Folklife Center (Library of Congress, n.d.). The Library Journal documented the origin of the Webcomics Archive, remarking that “The Webcomics collection stemmed from an agreement in 2011 between LC and the Small Press Expo (SPX), a convention celebrating artists, writers, and publishers of comic art. SPX is home to the Ignatz Awards, which recognize outstanding achievements in comics and cartooning; LC committed to capturing the finalists for the Outstanding Online Comic category” (Peet, 2017).

As essential and forward-thinking as the LC’s collection is, I find that it suffers from the same didactic restrictions as the mainstream publishers that early webcomic artists had intended to avoid. Limiting the archive to titles that have previously been award recipients is reminiscent of Wikipedia’s Notability criteria, in which “women subjects are more likely to be considered non-notable even if they meet Wikipedia’s criteria for inclusion”, according to a study about gender bias and structural inequities at Wikipedia (Tripodi, 2023). In other words, selection based on awards risks the potential disappearance of other webcomics that hold just as much merit in the fabric of our digital cultural heritage. Regardless of which titles are nominated, “Seed nominations are reviewed and, if approved, LC secures permissions from the site owners” before they are included in the archive (Peet, 2017). This leaves the inclusion or exclusion of webcomics up to the subjectivity of LC curatorial staff, rather than a truly community-built effort that represents the full extent of the art form.

Additionally, the LC’s workflow involves capturing a webcomic in “snapshot form; the archives represent how a website looked at a specific point in time, and are not meant to serve as a mirror site but rather to provide data about what people were clicking on, and when. To that end, a site—usually containing some combination of text, images, audio, videos, and PDFs—is generally captured more than once” (Peet, 2017). This introduces vulnerabilities as the snapshots must be consistently maintained over time, and webcomics can be notoriously fickle, either ongoing in perpetuity or going on indefinite hiatus depending on the artist’s creative stamina. That being said, with its robust procedures to ensure the provenance of a webcomic is preserved along with creator permissions, it is still the leader in the quest to make webcomics accessible and findable for patrons for many years to come.

Judging by the work of the Library of Congress, it’s clear that I am hardly the first person to take on this endeavor. I have a debt to pay in large part to Erin Donahue, whose Webcomic Schema proved immensely useful to this project. Erin developed the Webcomic Schema in 2014 as a student at The University of Texas at Austin (Donahue, n.d.). While Erin’s schema is comprehensive and simple to use, it constitutes a folksonomy, as the metadata fields are not tied to any existing metadata standards; rather, Erin used Dublin Core as an inspirational basis to develop her schema.

More than a decade later, I am happy to pick up the baton and apply standardization practices to Erin’s thoughtful blueprint, along with controlled vocabularies and thesauri for cataloging purposes, presented via Omeka S. Ideally, by standardizing Erin’s schema and utilizing WikiData URI’s to set the stage for linked data applications in the future, I will have developed a middle ground between Erin’s do-it-yourself approach, which mirrors the independent ethos of webcomics, and the approach of major institutions like the Billy Ireland Library and the Library of Congress, which emphasize information science principles for digital preservation and retrieval.

The collection of webcomics in this project is representative of the variety of techniques, perspectives, and manifestations of the medium. A large portion are titles that I myself have read and fawned over, like Octopus Pie, not just because of my own fandom, but because of my familiarity with the material lending itself to tasks such as subject and descriptive cataloging. Dates of creation range from 2003 to 2017, with several titles that are still being published up to the current day. The artists range from notable award-winning authors to purely independent creators. Genre and subject matter fluctuate from narrative, slice-of-life material, to romantasy titles, to absurdist humor, to queer fiction, and so on.

I wanted to assemble a selection as diverse as the medium itself, while challenging myself with designing a schema that was broad enough to properly describe each item without straying from metadata best practices. In the following section, I will describe my metadata fields in depth.

Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum. (n.d.). Digital Collections [Library Catalog]. Ohio State University. The Ohio State University: University Libraries. Retrieved April 4, 2026, from https://library.osu.edu/dc/catalog?f%5Badmin_set_sim%5D%5B%5D=billy+ireland+cartoon+library+and+museum&locale=en&search_field=all_fields

Donahue, E. (n.d.). Webcomic Schema [Personal Website]. Self-published. Erin Donahue. Retrieved April 4, 2026, from https://www.erincdonohue.com/webcomic-metadata-schema

Library of Congress. (n.d.). About this Collection | Webcomics Web Archive | Digital Collections | Library of Congress [Web Archive]. Congress.gov. Library of Congress: Digital Collections. Retrieved April 4, 2026, from https://www.loc.gov/collections/webcomics-web-archive/about-this-collection/

Peet, L. (2017, August 10). LC Launches Web Cultures, Webcomics Archives [News Outlet]. Media Source Incorporated. Library Journal. https://www.libraryjournal.com/story/lc-launches-web-cultures-webcomics-archives

Tripodi, F. (2023). Ms. Categorized: Gender, notability, and inequality on Wikipedia. New Media & Society, 25(7), 1687–1707. https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211023772