I'm working in a small cartoon museum where most of the items in the archives are either comic books or animation cells. I've been asked to organize the archive room. Should I organize them by character (Batman, for example) or by comic maker like DC or Marvel?
I work in museum and park collections management. There are a couple of directions you can go with this project.
A few questions to start out:
Are the books and cells already numbered or cataloged at all?
Are they organized in any way already? (In archives, depending on the situation, original order is extremely important, but I'm not sure that's the case here).
If they aren't numbered or cataloged at all, I would catalog the comic books together and the animation cells together, since I believe they would ideally be stored in different ways (again, depending on your circumstances).
I wouldn't worry so much about catalog order so long as you have some good software to record into. If you don't have any, look into CollectionSpace, which is free and open source. Excel isn't perfect, but with enough fields it would work.
In either type of database, you would include subject (Batman), date, author/illustrator and so forth in different fields that you should be able to search through.
I've got a staff meeting starting now, but I think those are some quick basic ideas. Let me know if you've got any questions!
Personally my preference would be to do a full cataloging on them in, probably in LC call numbers, and be done with it, and not mess around with any idiosyncratic in-house organization. Comic books are not terribly rare and you can probably copy-catalog most of them and not have to hand-catalog all of them. The cells I find a little more challenging, I'd probably catalog them by studio-->series-->year? I assume they're intellectually linked to a published product for each of the cells and not like, random sketches? Hard to say until I saw them.
But first the basic cataloging questions! Who's going to use these materials? What reference questions do you anticipate trying to answer out of this collection? Are you going to be creating MARC records and putting them into a catalog or anything like that? Do you want the cataloging in a format that will be easy for union catalogs to harvest?