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Digital Dogs

In a recent feature on their blog, our colleagues at NCSU Libraries posted some photographs of dogs from their collections. Being a person generally interested in dogs and old photographs, I became curious where dogs show up in Duke’s Digital Collections. Using very unsophisticated methods, I searched digital collections for “dogs” and thought I’d share what I found.

Of the 60 or so collections in Digital Collections 19 contain references to dogs. The table below lists the collections in which dogs or references to dogs appear most frequently.

Digital Collection Number of Items Referring to Dogs
Outdoor Advertising Association of America (OAAA) Archives, 1885-1990s 91
Historic American Sheet Music 40
William Gedney Photographs and Writings 39
R.C. Maxwell Company Outdoor Advertising 27
OAAA Slide Library 24
Sidney D. Gamble Photographs 12
Emergence of Advertising in America 11
Hugh Mangum Photographs 10
Musée des Horreurs 9
AdViews 7
Ad*Access 5
John Paver Papers 5
Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia 4
Broadsides & Ephemera 3
American Song Sheets 3
Michael Francis Blake Photographs 2
Italian Posters 2
Paul Kwilecki Photographs 2
Medicine and Madison Avenue 1

As you might guess, not all the results for my search were actually photographs of dogs. Many from the advertising collections were either advertisements for dog food or hot dogs. There were quite a few ads and other materials where the word “dog” was used idiomatically. The most surprising finding to me was number of songs that are about or reference dogs. These include, “Old Dog Tray” and “The Whistler and His Dog” from Historic American Sheet Music, as well as “A Song for Dogs” and “Bull Dog an’ de Baby” from American Song Sheets.

Here’s a sampling of some photographs of dogs from Digital Collections, and a few cats as well.

Kwilecki

Hugh Mangum Photographs


Sidney D. Gamble Photographs



William Gedney Photographs and Writings







Documentary Photographs of Early Soviet Russia

R.C. Maxwell Company Outdoor Advertising


OAAA Archives

Michael Francis Blake Photographs