Library of Congress WPA posters

An American phenomenon, WPA (Work Project Administration) posters make a fascinating comparison with contemporary British poster style. The WPA website of the Library of Congress contains 932 posters of the 1930s and 1940s, which can be searched, browsed or viewed as a slide show.

The posters were a government intiative and were "designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and educational programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia, with the strongest representation from California, Illinois, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania."

The images are accompanied by full metadata, including detailed iconographic indexing. Subjects include exhibitions, books, concerts, shows, and health and safety.

(C) Library of Congress

Patent medicine cards at UCLA

UCLA Library digital collections includes 247 Patent Medicine cards (1870 to c. 1906) from the Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library. History and Special Collections for the Sciences. These which can be browsed by language (almost exclusively English), name and subject.  Detailed metadata can be seen by clicking on the title. This also brings up a Zoomify function (which wasn't working when I tried it).

Thumbnails can be seen by clicking on the Patent Medicine cards main title or by selecting brochures, still images or trade cards under Type: still images and trade cards (genre) are applied to most of the material to enable cross-searching with other collections.   The beta viewer requires a specific term, but then allows panning of the image.

(C) UCLA

Posters at Harvard

Posters from the Widener Library are being digitised.  6,686 posters from the Thomas Hill collection and 470 from the James Howard Fraser collection are currently online through VIA (Visual Information Access). The main focus of the posters are the German Democratic Republic 1949-1990, and AIDS.

Other posters in Harvard collections are also online through VIA (11,364 hits for 'poster').  Good-size thumbnails are publicly available, but full-size images are restricted to the Harvard community.  Visible records are minimal (title and date) but results can be sorted by creator, title, nationality/culture, work type, date, and materials and techniques.

 

Copyright 2004 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

The Lamb Collection at Dundee Central Library

The Lamb Collection at Dundee Cental Library Local History Centre contains 450 boxes of ephemera, including photographs, maps, prints and books. Alexander Crawford Lamb (1843-1897), owner of a Dundee temperance hotel, set out to preserve evidence of Dundee's past -in  trade, commerce and the activities of its inhabitants.

Much of this material is now being surfaced, through the the Local History Centre website, which has an introduction to the collection, Lamb's biography and obituary, and sections on 19th century entertainment, cholera epidemics and crime. Each of these subjects is introduced and is represented by a short slide show.

© Dundee City Council 2009

Beyond this, The Silence of the Lamb project has led to the cataloguing and digitisation of 2,400 items, available through Resources for Learning in Scotland. 491 of these so far can be browsed as a collection as well as cross-searched with other collections. A feature of RLS is its Pathfinders, which provides themed learning resources.

Duke University Libraries: John W. Hartman Center

Still on the American theme, Duke University Libraries' Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History in the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library has seven major projects, one an encyclopedia, the other six digital, all aiming to promote "understanding of the social, cultural, and historical impact of advertising, marketing, and sales".  This is a major initiative, focussing mainly on magazines and newspapers (rather than ephemera), television commercials, billboards, and outdoor advertisiing.

The Emergence of Advertising in America: 1850-1920 has over 2,800 advertisements, mostly from magazines, searchable by company, product, date, format, publication, etc.

(C) Duke University

But there is more!
Ad*Access contains 7,000 American and Canadian advertisements, divided into Beauty & Hygiene (1911-56), Radio (1922-56), Television (1939-57), Transportation (1938-57), and World War II (1942-45).

(C) Duke University

... and more
 AdViews is a "digital archive of thousands of vintage television commercials dating from the 1950s through the 1980s, and created or collected by the D'Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles advertising agency"

...and more
Medicine and Madison Avenue has 600 advertisements relating to health.

Road: Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions (no images) and Road 2.0 (20,000 images) document bill boards and other outdoor advertising.

There are online exhibitions, supplementary information, a blog, RSS feeds, comment boxes, twitter - a multitude of web 2.0 functionality, and it is fun! Thank you Duke University.