All posts by Maura

Database Review

Databases, Reviews

Overview

American Consumer Culture: Market Research and American Business, 1935-1965 primarily consists of the digitized papers of Ernest Dichter held by the Hagley Museum and Library. Dichter began his market research career in the United States in 1938 and founded his own market research consulting firm, the Institute for Motivational Research, in 1948. His papers were donated to the Hagley by his family; other papers, probably from his European offices, are housed at the University of Vienna and are not part of this database. The database also includes advertising images from the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History at Duke University and The Advertising Archives, which sells images for commercial use and posters, prints, etc. of these images for personal use. These are located under the “Ad Gallery” section of the database. In addition to these primary sources, the database includes secondary material: four case studies of specific industries, four overview/background essays, teaching resources, brief biographies of thirty-five companies covered in the database, a glossary of business and marketing terms, and a list of links to external sites that also discuss business history, market research, and consumer culture. These are under the “Further Resources” section of the database. There is also an interactive chronology that covers consumer culture in the United States, Dichter’s life, and major historical events.

The database supports Boolean, phrase, proximity, and wildcard searches. It allows keyword searching of the full-text and item metadata as well as searches of the following metadata fields: title, commissioned by, company, and brand. Searches can be combined with limiting by document type (letter, memorandum, pilot study, proposal, report, supporting material), industry (thirty-one options), language (eight options), or date. Searches can also be further restricted to the Ad Gallery or Secondary Resources.

Document metadata includes numerous fields, all of which can be searched using a keyword search: title, box number, report number, holding library, copyright holder, date, document type, industry, commissioned by, conducted by, place, company, brand, method, keywords (tags, not controlled vocabulary), language, and links to related documents. The company field can be linked to the business biographies (not all businesses have biographies), the keyword field is linked to the glossary (although not all terms are in the glossary), and the date field is linked to the chronology. Snippets of individual pages show the search terms in context and results can be ranked according to relevance, the pages they appear on, and number of hits.

Image metadata includes title, date, image type (magazine, newspaper, or poster), collection (usually a subset of the source), source (Hartman Center at Duke University or The Advertising Archives), industry, company, brand, keywords, publication (which magazine or newspaper), and image details (drawing, photo, color, etc.). These are also searchable using a keyword anywhere search. The inclusion of keywords with the images greatly improves their searchability, as the keywords are often more descriptive of the content of the ad than the title of the ad. For example, one ad is titled “Active days are here again,” which is not very descriptive. The keywords, “women, feminine hygiene, feminine products, sanitary napkin, sport,” add more detail to the title, industry (personal products), and company (Kotex) information and potentially make it more findable.

Users can browse documents and then filter by document type, industry, and language. There is also a browsable list of industries that provides a brief overview of each industry and links to the documents and images associated with that industry. The Ad Gallery can also be browsed and filtered by industry, decade, image type, and brand.

Documents can be downloaded as PDFs and are scanned cover to cover in full-color. Images can be downloaded individually or as a set in a PDF document. They can also be formatted as a slideshow. They are also in full-color and don’t appear to be cropped. The database offers a personal account called “MY ARCHIVE” to which documents, images, and slideshows can be added.

The database does privilege search, but encourages browsing behavior by including browsing options in the main navigation. Browsing via industry, company, document/image type are foregrounded, which means that others, such as methodology or subject keywords are not. Given the scope of the original collection, though, this browsing schema makes a lot of sense. It is also quite different from other Adam Matthew and specific to this database. Linking to popular searches introduces the potential for serendipity. The manuscript collection is narrowly focused and has clear boundaries, although the database does acknowledge that there might be overlap with the non-digitized collection at the University of Vienna and that not all items may be included in the database. There is also a link to the finding aid for the original manuscript collection at the Hagley Museum and Library in the “Introduction” section of the database. The boundaries of the ad collections are less obvious; it is only apparent that the images come from two different sources. While the Hartman Center at Duke is fairly clear about what sorts of items it collects, The Advertising Archives is less forthcoming.

Facts

Date range: 1935-1965

Publisher: Adam Matthew

Publisher About page: http://www.amdigital.co.uk/m-collections/collection/american-consumer-culture-1935-1965/

Object type: Reports, pilot studies, memorandums, proposals, correspondence, surveys, questionnaires, case studies, other manuscript materials, images

Location of original materials: Hagley Museum and Library, Duke University, The Advertising Archives

Exportable image: Yes

Facsimile image: Yes

Full text searchable: Yes

Titles list links: CSV file available here

History/Provenance

The manuscript materials from the Hagley Museum and Library appear to have been digitized from the original materials, not microfilm, by Adam Matthew. The images from the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History at Duke University also appear to have been digitized from the original materials, since the physical items are held by Duke. The provenance for the images from The Advertising Archives is a little more unclear; the FAQ implies that they have scanned the images, but also that they don’t necessarily hold the copyright, which isn’t surprising in the case of a company like Coca-Cola. The holding library is indicated in the metadata for each document and image and can be searched using a keyword search.  

Reviews

Library Journal review

Choice review (original paywalled, duplicated on Adam Matthew site)

Access

Adam Matthew offers institutional purchases. The WorldCat record lists institutions that have access.

The standard license agreement in PDF format is available on Adam Matthew’s site.

Info from Publisher

Information about the database

Contact information for Adam Matthew

Citing

There is a lot of information about citing, use, and copyright in the FAQ section of the database, including this paragraph (page is paywalled):

“American Consumer Culture: Market Research and American Business provides access to valuable source materials which you may wish to cite in essays and projects. Students should cite items in their footnotes as per the scholarly standard for such citations. Reference should be made to the specific item and the library holding the original material. While browsing you can consult the copyright notice at the bottom of the image, which provides details of the library of origin, the title, date and issue number (if relevant). Students should consult their supervisors for their preferred style (for example, see the MHRA website for a free download of the Style Guide). If you need clarification please ask your academic supervisor.”

A Guide to Digitization

Uncategorized

Any guide to digitization should be begin by acknowledging that digitization can only ever be partial, as demonstrated in the Digitizing Your Kitchen activity. Both photography and video cannot convey the smell, taste, or feel of a physical object. But both forms of digitization can convey other aspects of physical objects such as texture, sound, color, shape, size, and textual elements. In many cases, the incomplete access to physical objects through digitization can suffice for users; Terras cites numerous reasons for digitization, many of which can be satisfied without actually accessing the physical object. The Digitizing Your Kitchen activity focused on photography and video, but all methods of digitization (and indeed, representation itself) are incomplete. An audio or video recording will capture the sound of a concert, but not what the audience looked like or what the experience of sitting in the audience felt like. This Digital Sugar Baby cannot capture and convey the smell of the Domino Sugar Factory immediately before the closing of “A Subtlety” in July 2014. Even though the Internet Arcade lets you play arcade games from the 1980s, the context is ultimately missing. I find this aspect of digitization quite interesting, as I was an anthropology major and archaeology courses emphasized the context of items – what were the next to, where were they in space, etc. – in addition to the items themselves. The Digitizing Your Kitchen activity contrasted to an archaeological analysis of my kitchen I did as an undergraduate, which focused much more heavily on the items as part of a larger whole. In some cases, digitization can reproduce some or part of this context; in others, context is not known (due to the histories of the items, collection practices, and so on) or cannot be included for other reasons.

 

A guide to digitization, following on this, would acknowledge the constructedness of digitized items and collections, or as Conway describes it, it would disavow its own “technological transparency.” Digitization is “a complex, multifaceted process where technological tools, source characteristics and the often unexpressed goal of the collection interact at every step of the process.” People make decisions about what items to digitize and how to digitize them. The Frey/Reilly model discussed by Conway does a great job in demonstrating those sorts of choices – should photographs be digitized as is, as was, as desired, or as seen? – and the results of those choices. I would also emphasize in my guide to digitization that people made choices about these items prior to digitization as well, about which items were saved, about which were sent to libraries or museums, about which were added to those collections and which were scrapped, sold, or weeded. Many students that I work with, both graduate and undergraduate, do not consider the histories of their primary sources. There is an assumption that somehow everything has been preserved and digitized. Part of this I think stems from perception of digital items as immaterial, as Manoff describes.  That immateriality obscures the costs of digitization – labor, server space, etc., which Terras’s case studies describe at length – and the material history digitized objects. I’m very sympathetic to Manoff’s call to bring a historical and contextual perspective to the study of the digital environment, and any guide to digitization I wrote would emphasize this.

 

This rambling post can basically be summarized by saying my guide to digitization would foreground the partial and imperfect nature of digitization and the context and history of both the items and their digital representations. Digitization captures some elements but will never capture everything; representation, as Conway notes, is fraught, and as Manoff argues, something is always lost in the translation from one medium to another. Photos can’t capture sound or smell. Video can’t capture taste or weight. No form of representation can capture the historical and material context around the item in whole. This does not mean that digitization is not useful. Digitized photos can convey much of the information in film photos, even if other information is added in the process of digitization as Conway describes. Video can convey a lot of information about a three-dimensional item, like my Rolf mug. You can see what size it is, the color, the shape, the interior, the exterior, the bottom, and so on. Neely and Langer describe using 3D printing to create representations of museum objects. I’m a little skeptical, given that the 3D printer at my library mostly produces neon plastic models that don’t reveal a lot about the original item, but I can see the potential in 3D printing to capture the way an object feels. When working with digitized representations, we need to keep in mind that they are surrogates for the physical item and have their own characteristics. Choices contributed to the creation of the digital representation, just as they did in the creation of the physical object. We need to keep in mind that digital representations might be missing some crucial aspect of the object; I brought up “A Subtlety” earlier because the smell of rotting sugar was key to the overall work and no digital representation can recreate that. In many cases, this might not matter to users – undergraduates are unlikely to care about the types of paper and binding seen in the physical collection of EEBO books. In this case, too, the different characteristics of the digital representation such as being able to do a full-text search for words and variant spellings of those word or a metadata search for a subject heading like “witchcraft” might be of greater interest and use to users. But to film scholars, looking at the digitized version of a film might not be able to replace looking at the original film. It is fundamentally about understanding as the object and its digital representation as connected, but also distinct.

O Say Can You See

Creative Commons Sources, Public Domain Sources

O Say Can You See gathers together public domain legal and personal records, specifically in the following categories:

  • All petitions for freedom cases originating in the D.C. Circuit Court sittings in Washington and Alexandria, 1800-1862
  • Civil Cases involving African American families, 1800-1820
  • Chancery Records involving African American families, 1800-1820
  • Criminal Records involving African American families, 1800-1820

The project distributed under a Creative Commons license.