The search results on our site will often take you very close to what you were look­ing for. If this is all the infor­ma­tion you need, you can request the item and have it brought to you in our read­ing room.
But some­times researchers want to get a broader under­stand­ing of what this mate­r­ial is and where it came from. Luck­ily, there’s usu­ally plenty more infor­ma­tion about the rest of the mate­ri­als in the col­lec­tion, where they came from, what they’re about, and who col­lected them.
The “Col­lec­tion His­tory” tab near the left of the find­ing aid will tell you about what hap­pened to this mate­r­ial before it came to us, and how archivists inter­vened in the prepa­ra­tion of these records for research use.
Archivists also write short essays pro­vid­ing a sense of the his­tory of the mate­ri­als and a gen­eral sense of what a researcher will find within. You can find that infor­ma­tion on the “Descrip­tion” tab on the left.
For a quick view of how the mate­ri­als in the col­lec­tion are arranged, click on the “Con­tents” tab. This will often give a short expla­na­tion of how and why mate­ri­als were arranged this way, and will also show an abstrac­tion of the collection’s contents.