Search Hints

Any word or words put in the “Search” box will return a list of all the cartoons which include the word or words anywhere in the metadata. Any words that appear in blue in a record can be keyword searched by clicking on the word or phrase.

Clicking “Browse All” will bring up a full list of all (nearly 11,000) cartoons, a screen at a time. The default sort is by “Date Original” (the original date of publication), from earliest cartoon (1900) to last (1962).

Clicking on “Date Original” will sort the “browse” list to reverse chronological order by date of publication. Cartoons not yet fully cataloged have been given “funny” dates that place them after the dated cartoons, so on re-sort they will come up first. This may be distracting for the moment, but if you move past them, you will find the main body sorted from 1962 to 1900.  

This re-sorting function works whenever you are viewing a list. Use it if you would like to review all of Darling’s cartoons in a particular month or year.  For example, enter “1917” in the Search box.  This will bring up a list of all cartoons which include the numbers “1”, “9” and “7” in the record. This list will contain many cartoons published in years other than 1917.You can fairly easily determine where in the list the cartoon for January 1, 1917 (1917-01-01) appears. You can then browse through the year day by day and month by month.

Clicking “Title” will re-sort a list alphabetically by the words in the title field. Titles that begin with a number rather than a letter come up first. Clicking “Subject – Topics” will re-sort alphabetically by the first topic listed in this field.  

The Topics, People, Events, and Depictions fields use “controlled vocabulary.” That is, selected terms, and only selected terms, are used to “collect” cartoons in order to demonstrate interesting aspects of Darling’s work. Clicking on “Topics” on the home page will bring up the list of words selected for that field.  Browsing the list will suggest interesting terms to search, “Accidents,” perhaps, to see how Darling used them for both humorous and serious purposes.

The “Advanced Search” screen is less intuitive but can be used effectively for more precise search results.  Note that to use it to search all but only the Darling cartoons, you must first go to the very bottom of the page and click “clear all” to unclick all the collections, then click on the button in front of “Editorial Cartoons…,” and return to the top. You can then build searches around the options shown in blue. Clicking “show terms” (at the end of each line when you’ve clicked on the option “Selected fields”) brings up in a new, small window the same controlled vocabulary lists that you can access from the home page.

If you don’t “clear all,” you will be running your search against all of the digital collections at this site, and you will likely retrieve a large number of unwanted objects.