Ad*Access - A Source for Early 20th Century Ads

Sometimes it can be really difficult to get your hands on old print advertisements, but Duke University's Ad*Access catalog provides free access to over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements from between 1911 and 1955.

The ads cover five product categories:

• Beauty and Hygiene
• Radio
• Television
• Transportation
• World War II Propaganda

What's also really helpful is that the catalog provides a timeline of major events and inventions, which helps to put the ads in context.

This resource is definitely worth a look if you are working on a historical advertising project.

New Study on Tailored Advertising

Dr. Joe Turow from the Annenberg School at the University of Pennsylvania and researchers from the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology and the Annenberg Public Policy Center have just released a new report suggesting that Americans reject tailored advertising. The study included a telephone survey taken last summer of 1000 U.S. adults and found that 66% of those surveyed say that they don't want marketers to tailor advertisements to their preferences.

While I think this is an interesting finding, I wonder how many Americans are actually aware of how much advertising is already tailored to their interests. While Americans may say that they don't like it, I think that tailored advertising is not going away anytime soon.

NINE PAGES OF ERRORS!!!!

According to a story on InsideHigherEd.com, the American Psychological Association (APA) released nine pages worth of corrections to the latest print edition of their style manual which came out over the summer. They also released four corrected sample papers.

How can students be expected to get their citations right if the citation manual can't even get them right? This boggles my mind...

Films on Demand

If you are looking for an educational video in Communication, take a look at Films on Demand. This database now available through Cook Library and it offers thousands of streaming videos available on and off-campus.

A quick search of "communication" yielded 376 segments on a variety of topics including communication in the workplace, communication and autism, and nonverbal communication, just to name a few.