Announcement of New Ameritech Collections on American Memory

[danna bell-russel]

With a gift from Ameritech in 1996, the Library of Congress sponsored a
three-year competition ending in 1999 to enable public, research, and
academic libraries, museums, historical societies, and archival
institutions (except federal institutions) to create digital collections
of primary resources.  These digital collections complement and enhance
the collections of the National Digital Library Program at the Library
of Congress. The most recent additions to the Ameritech collections
available online are Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian:
Photographic Images and Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920:
Selections from the Collections of Duke University

The Northwestern University Library has made available images from The
North American Indian by Edward S. Curtis, one of the most significant
and controversial representations of traditional American Indian culture
ever produced. Issued in a limited edition from 1907-1930, the
publication continues to exert a major influence on the image of Indians
in popular culture. Curtis said he wanted to document "the old time
Indian, his dress, his ceremonies, his life and manners." In over 2000
photogravure plates and narrative, Curtis portrayed the traditional
customs and lifeways of eighty Indian tribes. The twenty volumes, each
with an accompanying portfolio, are organized by tribes and culture
areas encompassing the Great Plains, Great Basin, Plateau Region,
Southwest, California, Pacific Northwest, and Alaska.  Featured here are
all of the published photogravure images including over 1500
illustrations bound in the text volumes, along with over 700 portfolio
plates.  An Advisory Board of educators and researchers in American
Indian history and culture helped to recommend means of setting the work
of Curtis in context, including soliciting essays by well-known
scholars, addressing questions of how Curtis worked, what his work has
meant to Native peoples of North America, and how he promoted the view
dominant in the early twentieth century, that American Indians were
becoming a "vanishing race." The collection can be viewed at <
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ienhtml/curthome.html>

The Emergence of Advertising in America, 1850-1920 presents over 9,000
images relating to the early history of advertising in the United
States.  The images are drawn from over a dozen separate collections in
the Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing History, one of
the nation's pre-eminent programs for the study of sales, advertising,
and marketing, and the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections
Library at Duke University. Included in this collection are cookbooks,
photographs of billboards, print advertisements, trade cards, calendars,
almanacs, and leaflets for a multitude of products.  Highlights include
early advertisements from Kodak and Lux, materials documenting the first
tobacco advertising and scrapbooks showing a variety of advertising
media. Together, they illuminate the early evolution of this most
ubiquitous feature of modern American business and culture. The
collection also documents the rise of consumer culture and the
development of a professionalized advertising industry in the United
States. Of special interest to those studying the development of the
advertising industry are textbooks and other instruction resources used
to provide instruction in developing advertising campaigns and the
creation of advertising agencies. This collection can be viewed at
<http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award98/ncdhtml/eaahome.html>

Those interested in learning about the Ameritech competition, the awards
made in each of the three years for which the competition ran, and the
guidelines that were given to applicants can locate information at the
following url: <http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/award/index.html>  

Please send any questions to ndlpcoll at loc.gov