The instructions below will show you how to find and view the Brewster collection on the National Library's website. The file is best viewed with your favourites/bookmarks turned off. My thanks to the National Library of Ireland for permission to reproduce the cartoons.

This is simply a matter of putting nli.ie into the address bar on your browser and you're away. Then click on the Main Catalogue under the Online Catalogues heading.

Enter gordon brewster in the vacant search field.

You're now into the collection and there is a choice of viewing each cartoon under two different formats. The first is got by clicking on the title of the cartoon and the second by clicking on the image itself.

The first option gives you a medium size reproduction of the cartoon, but with the option of enlarging it within the window, and it also gives you background information. Clicking the link Show more notes may bring up additional information, depending on the individual cartoon.

In this case it is a description of the cartoon but in other cases is may be the text of any extended caption or commentary where this accompanies the cartoon itself.

While the description may not add to your understanding of the cartoon it does mean that the descriptive text is digitally searchable and this makes it possible to find cartoons where text is in the image itself and would not register in a digital search.

Reproducing the captions, and the published commentary which accompanies some of the cartoons, is very useful as (i) it is sometimes difficult to read the manuscript, and (ii) it puts all this text into the digital search parameter.

The second option (clicking on the cartoon itself in the intial screen) will give you a more or less full screen reproduction which you can explore through the navigator on the top right. You can reduce the size of the navigatr by clicking on the arrow at the bottom of it or get rid of it altogether by pressing h on the keyboard and then dragging the image around with the cursor.

The initial image adapts to the screen space available, so you are well advised to have your favourites/bookmarks turned off to avail of the full screen width.

As well as scrolling through the collection page by page, you can search for individual cartoons or groups of cartoons by inserting relevant search terms into the catalogue's own search bar. Leave the gordon brewster there to identify the collection and just add in the relevant terms separated by a space.