History of Advertising Trust

The History of Advertising Trust collections are divided into: Advertising Agencies, Advertising Regulation and Codes of Practice, Clubs, Associations and Organisations, Corporate Marketing Archives (including Hovis, HP Foods, Rowntree, SmithKline Beecham, and Sturmey Archer), Designers and Creatives, Professional Interest Bodies, TV and Cinema Commercials, HAT Special Collections & Compilations, and HAT Library. The site contains a wealth of visual material, including an Online gallery. There is also the facility to buy Vintage Advertising Poster Prints.

(c) HAT

Victoria and Albert Museum

The V&A Search Collections pages enable cross-searching their wonderful material in imaginative and very visual ways. For ephemera, try poster, ephemera, greetings card, Christmas, private view, menu, bag, programme (Theatre and performance collection), ticket...

(c) V&A

You can narrow your searches in all sorts of ways, e.g Ticket brings up lots of metal bottle tickets, but you can limit by Prints, Drawings and Paintings Collections, then by Advertising, Entertainment, Transport etc.  It's great to have the wider context of the material though. All with useful Help screens (at the bottom) explaining how to search, view and order images.
A real voyage of discovery: one of my favourite sites.

NYPL Menu crowd-sourcing

(c) New York Public Library

What's on the menu?

I love the New York Public Library approach to menu transcription by crowd-sourcing (What's on the menu) and am thinking of ways to implement something similar for the John Johnson Collection. Possible projects are transcribing the titles and tagging the image content of WW1 postcards and transcribing the lists of products purchased in Bill Headings. Watch this space!
There is a great introduction to the NYPL menus too: http://legacy.www.nypl.org/research/chss/grd/resguides/menus/

Huntley & Palmers website

(c) Reading Borough Council

The Huntley & Palmers website is full of information, and ephemera.  Stunning!

British Library's Historical Calendar

(c) British Library

Really enjoyed finding the British Library's Historical Calendar and seeing ephemera taking its place among other material to illustrate our past

Evanion Collection (British Library)

(c) British Library

The British Library's Evanion Collection has two main themes: Popular Entertainment and Everyday Life.  Images from the Collection are available through Collect Britain and can be licensed through the BL's Images Online.