Duke Library noted last Friday a new addition to its AdViews digital archive. AdViews, is an online archive for old commercials. The bulk of it is only viewable through iTunes (sigh) though you can do a search.

The new addition to AdViews includes over 1,800 commercials and a couple of interviews about advertising. That brings to total count of commercials in the archive to almost 10,000. The new content in the archives includes commercials for Bran & Prune Flakes (ew!), Corn Crackos, Dennis the Menace Peanut Puffs, and Crispy Critters.

If you don’t have access to iTunes, you can still search the commercials at http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/adviews/ — you just won’t be able to see the commercials. I did a search for cereal and got 26 results with screenshots from the commercials. If you click on the image you’ll get a little more information about it but to actually open the media you’ll still need to go to iTunes.

I hate that you have to have iTunes to see this collection, but at least with the search mechanism you can do an intial search and find the stuff you want to look at, before you go bug your friend who has the computer with iTunes…