The advertisements included in the site are drawn from the J. Walter Thompson Company Competitive Advertisements Collection and include examples selected from five major categories: Beauty and Hygiene; Radio; Television; Transportation; and World War II.

Rather than including just a few advertisements on many topics, this approach offers researchers and students enough material to begin to understand advertising for a certain product or time period. Each of the categories has previously attracted considerable research interest, and each also reflects major developments in American society, culture, business, and technology in the first half of the 20th century.

Every advertisement has a separate record. This record includes a thumbnail image of the ad and two possible viewing sizes (full size and 2x magnification), with descriptive information about the advertisement. Past research requests provided the basis for determining what criteria would be most useful to researchers for accessing the advertisements. A 42-field database was created with categories such as 'company', 'product', 'date', 'type of illustration', etc. The database was converted into SGML format in EAD (Encoded Archival Description).

Consistent with other Digital Scriptorium resources, Ad*Access has been enhanced with added-value features including brief histories of the various industries and background on World War II advertising campaigns such as those for war bonds and v-mail. Additionally, searching with Boolean operators is available. This complex search option allows researchers the ability to more narrowly limit their returns, thus increasing the flexibility of the database.

Ad*Access provides a rich introduction to advertising in the middle of the twentieth century and a unique resource for studying advertisements online. The John W. Hartman Center (http://scriptorium.lib.duke.edu/hartman) at Duke University is one of the nation's pre-eminent programs for the study of sales, advertising, and marketing. The Center's mission is to promote understanding of the immense cultural impact of these fields by expanding its vast collection of textual and multimedia resources and increasing the access to these materials by students, scholars, and businesses worldwide.