ROAD, the Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions, is a database providing access to over 50,000 descriptions of images of outdoor advertising dating between the 1920s through the 1990s.  There are no images available on this web-site, only descriptions of the images. The materials described here are drawn from collections in the holdings of the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Duke University and are included as a supplement to an NEH grant-funded  project to provide access to Duke's outdoor advertising material. 

As of June 2011, over 20,000 images from the ROAD collection have been digitized and are available online via the ROAD2.0 website. Try it now!

Copyright Information

The advertisement descriptions on this web site have been made available for use in research, teaching, and private study. For these purposes under Fair Use, you may request to reproduce (print, make photocopies, or electronic file) materials from this web site without prior permission of the company which produced the ad(s), on the condition that you provide proper attribution of the source in all copies. For information on requesting a copy please see the image reproduction information section. We appreciate hearing from teachers, students, and researchers who are using our resources in interesting ways. (more...)