View Original Grant Proposal (PDF Format, 144 KB)

Press Release

Through partial coincidence and good fortune, two of the most significant collections in the world of posters from World War I and World War II are located within close physical proximity, in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The University of Minnesota Libraries owns six thousand items and the Minneapolis Public Library's collection consists of nearly two thousand posters. Both collections contain posters from government, commercial, and charitable organizations. These collections are multi-national in scope and cover veterans' benefits, war bonds and loans, military recruitment and morale, civil defense, industrial production, freedom and loyalty campaigns, international welfare organizations, prices and rationing, transportation, health and safety, labor organizations, films and theatre, food production, sports and leisure, recruiting of women in military and non-combatant organizations, special events, anti-war movements, and other topics. The visual, political and social content of these posters demonstrate "that in time of national emergency the artist can perform a service as valuable in its way as that of any other worker in defense." Artists such as James Montgomery Flagg, James H. Daugherty, Ben Shahn, Gil Spear, Otto Fischer and many others are represented in the collections.

Three-fourths of the combined total from both collections, over five thousand posters, were suitable for digitization and description after concerns such as physical condition, copyright, and duplicates were considered. Successfully digitizing and describing so many oversized posters from both World Wars constituted a major online research site. The majority of posters to be scanned were color images, and measured between 48" and 55" in either dimension, though about 700 postcards were also included. In the recent past, high-resolution scanning of such materials in a single scan would have been impossible. Digitizing very large formats in color, at a resolution appropriate for long-term storage of the digital copy, was prior to 2000 beyond the technical limits of most platforms on the market.

With major funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the University of Minnesota Libraries and the Minneapolis Public Library purchased a state-of-the-art digital camera for scanning oversized materials. The IMLS grant also paid for programming and cataloging staff support, so we could build a cross-collection database for both war poster collections.

This project officially commenced November 2001 and was completed in November 2004.