Overview:
Market Research and American Business 1935-1965, is a collection of digitized images of ads, market research, teaching tools and essays relating to the consumer culture of the mid-20th century. The collection is grounded in the market research reports of Ernest Dichter, a psychologist who used his expertise to transform the field of consumer marketing. The archive is easily navigated with an inviting level of visual interface accompanied by full text searchability.
The database is organized using an interactive chronology that relates the history of consumer culture to objects in the digital archive. It also contains an Ad Gallery that allows users to visually browse through hundreds of images. The database also provides a search engine using Boolean logic and an indexed search structure using predetermined groupings of keywords, brands and companies. Documents can be filtered by industry, date, language and genre. Full-text searches are supported.
Facts:
Date range: 1935-1965
Publisher: Adam Matthew
Publisher About page: http://www.amdigital.co.uk/about-us/
Object type: Images, letters, studies, memorandi, proposals, ads
Location of Original Materials: Hagley Museum and Library
Exportable image: Yes
Facsimile image: Yes
Full text searchable: Yes
Titles list links: Search directories; Advanced search
History / Provenance:
Original catalog: The collection is comprised of some of the papers of Ernest Dichter donated to the Hagley Museum and Library in 2007. Much of this collection has been digitized in color to make up the lion’s share of American Market Research 1935-1965. The full collection at the Hagley Library may be accessed here. Additional sources are held by the John W. Hartman Center at Duke University and The Advertising Archives.
Digitized from microfilm: No
Original sources: Dichter’s papers were donated to the Hagley Museum and Library by his Estate. A similar collection comprised of papers from his European office is housed at the University of Vienna.
Reviews:
Library Journal, November 2014
Access:
Click on World Cat to find proximal locations with access to the database
Click on here for access to a free trial from the publisher.
Info from Publisher:
A video from Adam Matthew detailing the collection.
Other Info:
The metadata for each contains annotations that provide cross references to related material and links to definitions for key words and other data.
Citing:
Consult Diana Hacker and Barbara Fister Research and Documentation Online 5th Edition for a guide to citing items from the database for a variety of academic disciplines.
