Comet Online came about through a collaboration between the Norman Nicholson Society and Lancaster University.  Since 2006, Comet has served as a forum for the Society’s members to share ideas, information and discoveries.

Being ambitious to make Comet available to an even broader audience, the Society approached researchers at Lancaster University in 2018 to see whether it might be possible to digitise past issue of the journal and to make these issues available online.

Following this initial conversation with Dr Paul Rayson, Reader in the School of Computing and Communications (SCC), the Society agreed that the proposed programme of digitisation would be an ideal undergraduate dissertation project for a computer science student.

With Dr Rayson’s support, the Society advertised the Comet digitisation project to relevant students in SCC, and we were delighted to receive an expression of interest from Mr Bartek Barański.

Mr Barański proved an excellent candidate for this project.  Working under the supervision of Dr Rayson and with the support of Dr Christopher Donaldson, Lecturer in Cultural History, and Dr Antoinette Fawcett (the Society’s Membership Secretary and Editor of Comet), Mr Barański developed Comet Online as a platform for digitally republishing past issues of Comet and for enabling visitors to browse these issues and the articles they contain.

The Society is grateful to Mr Barański for his work on this project, and we are indebted to Dr Rayson, Dr Donaldson and Dr Fawcett for their guidance and input.  Thanks to their collective effort, we are pleased to be able to preserve past issues of Comet in a digital format and to make the journal available to an even wider audience than ever before.

Comet Online currently includes the first 17 volumes of the journal (Spring 2006–Spring 2012), and we expect to make more issues available in due course.  In the meantime, the best way to access the latest issues of the journal is to subscribe by joining the Norman Nicholson Society.

If you are interested to know more, please visit the Membership enquiries page on our Society’s website.