AdViews: Don’t Touch That Dial! July 21, 2009
Posted by Jill Katte in : AdViews, Announcements , 4comments
The Duke Digital Collections team is excited to announce our newest project: AdViews, a digital archive of vintage television commercials. Our first batch of commercials went live in iTunes U last night (July 20, 2009), and we’ll continue to add thousands of historic commercials to the collection through the rest of 2009. By year’s end, the collection will contain over 10,000 digitized TV commercials from the archives, all available for FREE from Duke’s iTunes U site.
AdViews will provide students, teachers, and researchers access to a wide range of vintage brand advertising from the first four decades of mainstream commercial television. The collection will support interdisciplinary research, not only in marketing and advertising history, but also in visual studies, communication, women’s studies, public health, cultural anthropology, nutrition, technology, and more.
AdViews currently features commercials from the ad agency D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles (DMB&B), a New York advertising firm founded in 1929. The DMB&B archives are held at Duke in the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, a research center in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library.
Stay tuned! We’ll be right back with more AdViews updates and behind-the-scenes information…
You Know What We Did This Summer July 15, 2009
Posted by Rich in : Announcements, Broadsides, Trident , add a comment
I’ve been working in academic libraries for fourteen years now, and I still haven’t been able to convince my grandmother that working for a university doesn’t mean you get the summers off. We certainly haven’t been taking the summer off in the Digital Collections Program here at the Duke University Libraries, even though you haven’t seen most of the results of our summer work yet.
We premiered the Duke Digital Collections iPhone app back in June, which has been getting positive and enthusiastic feedback (thanks!), but otherwise most of our work has been behind-the-scenes stuff that will pay off in the future. Among our projects:
- The metadata phase of the Broadsides & Ephemera digital collection has begun in earnest, with a team of eight catalogers and archivists using our new metadata editor to describe these rare and valuable resources.
- Work continues on Trident, our digital collections system. With a new repository, a new metadata editor, and all sorts of other new developments, we’ll be able to create and manage digital collections better, faster, and more seamlessly than ever before, and deliver content in new and exciting ways.
- Our Digital Production Center continues digitizing materials for future collections at a furious rate. As usual, they’re very speedy and the rest of us sometimes feel like we’re trying to play catch-up with them….
- We’ve introduced new ways to keep up with the Digital Collections Program, including a Facebook page (come be our friend!) and more frequent Twitter updates, where we’ve been tweeting highlights from the Duke Digital Collections since the spring. We’ve also been posting with our digital collections colleagues from across the state to the North Carolina Digital Collections Collaboratory blog.
- Last but certainly not least, we’re about to launch a huge, fantastic, exciting, FUN new digital collection — hopefully next week — that we’re going to have to keep secret a bit longer. We hate to tease you … well, maybe we want to tease you a little bit. It’s completely different from anything we’ve done before in several ways that will become clear when it’s published. We’ve been working like fiends on this one, but we think it’s totally going to be worth it, and hope you will, too, when you see it. Stay tuned.
As always, thanks for reading, and for your support and interest. We hope you’re having as good a summer as we are. Don’t forget the sunscreen and the frosty beverage of your choice….
