Enjoying the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections


As someone who thoroughly enjoys the Duke University Libraries Digital Collections, specifically their Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions (ROAD), I thought that you might be interested in how I use it. 

I have a lot of fun with it, and mostly I just browse around, looking at the backgrounds. The images cover from 1863 to 1999, and I find it fascinating. I became addicted to doing it when I started finding images of Phoenix in the late '60s and early '70s, and I've since moved on to enjoying a much wider range. But it's not necessarily indexed for someone like me, it's designed to allow scholarly people to study historical outdoor advertising. Me, I'm just looking at stuff, and what I enjoy most is putting in some random keyword, like shirt, and seeing what comes up.


The next thing I see is a page with a bunch of thumbnails, and if something catches my eye I click on it, taking me to interesting places. Yes, of course I'm interested in the advertising, but I'm mostly interested in time-traveling, and these images are wonderful for that. When enlarged, they have lots of gorgeous detail, for two reasons 1) the original photos were taken with long-exposure, large format cameras and 2) the Duke University scanned them in at very high resolution. Most of the images are razor-shape, even when you zoom into them, and I just love zooming!

I'm not selling anything, I'm not writing a book, or anything important, I'm just having fun. I suppose you could call what I'm doing "scholarly research", because I really do a lot of research, but it's just fun for me. Go figure! And it's no fun to me if I don't share it, so I post stuff here. And I don't stamp "copyright" all over anything, including this blog, which you can use in any way you want - hopefully for enjoyment!

I'm an old advertising guy, and I understand the importance of advertising, which is what makes things like this blog free to you (Google isn't a charity!). So it all ties together for me. I also used to work for a college, and I've done web design, so I understand the effort that it takes to create a site like what the Duke University has put together, and I really appreciate it. If you have deep pockets (and I don't!) you may want to consider a generous donation to them, or maybe dedicating a building that could have your name on it. Mine would of course be: Brad Hall. But that's not possible for me, so I'll do something that I would have greatly appreciated as a teacher, I'll just say thank you. Thank you, Duke University!

If you like pictures of old-time Phoenix, please become a member of History Adventuring on Patreon. I share a LOT of cool old photos there, copyright-free, with no advertising. Your support makes it happen! Thank you!

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