The PiCoBoo project offered, for the first time, a detailed account of what these picturebooks were, how they were made, for whom, and it assessed their role in cultural, publishing and visual history.
The database has made accessible a large corpus of picturebooks previously dispersed across countries and institutions and only partially retrievable through local catalogues and not always correctly described. Working with network organisations it has been possible to define cataloguing standards and establish agreed practices for describing children’s picturebooks, thus providing a framework for understanding them. The database systematically gathers the results of book-in-hand analysis, archival research and hands-on training carried out at international institutions over collections and materials mostly inaccessible to general users. This also allowed further examinations in underlying changes in style, production, processes and features: progress in printing techniques, bindings, editorial aspects, artistic ambitions, price-points, thus demonstrating the changes in patterns of children’s book consumption and the ways in which publishers responded and sought to create demand. The gender dimension has also been, for the first time, integrated in the analysis, since many picturebook makers were women.
The outcomes of this action also resulted in a re-evaluation of museums and libraries collections, newly unveiled by the research work carried out there, and occasioned corrections and amendments of catalogue records.
In the absence of aggregators (serving as a background for collaborative research projects), and in need of protocols and practices (for recognising and cataloguing these books), the network and the database will substantially outlast the fellowship, therefore expanding the impact of the project and the researcher’s future career prospects. Through PiCoBoo website and database, the researcher is regularly contacted by scholars, collectors, librarians and curators worldwide asking for information, expertise, etc., also in the area of digital humanities.
Communication actions, particularly on social media, have popularised historical children’s picturebooks, their features and their makers, raising discussion and creating awareness.
The forthcoming publications and the implementation of the database, with results being separately published as methodological and research articles, will also further the project’s research goals, outlasting the project’s initial duration.
