Emergence of Advertising in America

Introduction:

This project is made possible by a grant from the 1998 Library of Congress/Ameritech National Digital Library Competition. The grant enables Duke Library’s Digital Scriptorium and the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising and Marketing History to make available rare advertising history resources.

Over 9,000 images are presented and illustrate the rise of consumer culture, between the time after the American Civil War to the birth of U.S. advertising industry. In all eleven categories, the images shown represent only a portion of a particular collection or series and include primarily items or pages that are especially informative and visually interesting. They chose not to scan some pages of dense text from books and pamphlets, and items that are very large or significantly damaged.

Purpose:

• To make a range of important, interesting, and rare advertising items widely available for study and research,

• To enhance the usefulness of the illustrative material with essays, a timeline, and bibliographies.

This project complements Duke Library's earlier project Ad Access which contains over 7,000 print advertisements organized into five subject categories from mainly U.S. magazines and newspapers.

Audience:

The images and texts on this web site have been made available for use in research, education, and private study.

Copyright:

For purpose of research and study, users may reproduce materials without prior permission. The site further states that under certain conditions specified in the law, libraries and archives are authorized to furnish a photocopy or other reproduction. One of these specified conditions is that the photocopy or reproduction is not to be "used for any purpose other than private study, scholarship, or research."

Comments:

Nicely organized but could have a little better visual appeal. It was created in the 90s, so that could be why it seems a little dated in its design. It’s an amazing collection and was chosen in 1997 as the Library of Congress/Ameritech Digital Library contest winner. It includes fairly extensive metadata that thoroughly explains the images. By simply clicking on a link, the user can see the image in different sizes. The images are of exceptional quality, especially considering the age of some of the collection. The collection can be easily browsed by narrowing a search by company, product, subject, and year. The collection categories are further explained in detail. For users who are not familiar with the history of advertising, there is a timeline of important events. I would definitely recommend viewing the Ad Access collection as well.