Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions (ROAD)

The Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions 2.0 (ROAD 2.0) project comprises images related to outdoor advertising from the twentieth century. It originated as a metadata-only database in 2003, funded by an grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Later, using a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC), Duke University Libraries digitized many of the images described in the original database. The digitized version of the collection launched in spring 2011 with over 22,000 items selected from four archival collections: the Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) Archives, the OAAA Slide Library, and the papers of prominent outdoor advertising figures John Paver and John Brennan. A fifth collection, the R.C. Maxwell Company Records, was digitized as a complement to the NHPRC grant-funded collection, and was added to the ROAD installation later in summer 2011. ROAD 2.0 is now a portal to over 31,000 outdoor advertising images.