Why does the site cover only outdoor advertising images?
The ROAD: Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions project is a limited one, a pilot effort to make a large group of historic outdoor advertisements available to the public. We decided to use selected collections from the NEH Outdoor Advertising grant-funded project. Within the database is descriptive information about each image so that researchers would be able to locate outdoor advertisements pertinent to their topic. These items have not been available for research until this time, as they were not processed or described before the project began. As there are a large number of other Hartman Center advertising collections on-line, the ROAD project was deemed an obvious addition to these resources. Although ROAD does not include the images of the billboard advertisements themselves, the descriptions provide similar access as do the other Hartman Center electronic databases.
