Tag Archives: collections

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In some cases, you may know more about our mate­ri­als than we do! Please feel free to leave a com­ment let­ting us know if you’ve seen a mis­take, if you have addi­tional infor­ma­tion, or if there’s some­thing that you think other patrons might like to know about our mate­ri­als.
If you need help, please click the “Get Help” but­ton near the top of the page.
And if you have any feed­back about our site as a whole, we would love to hear that too. Just click on the “Site Feed­back” but­ton above.

Sorting Lists of Materials

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This site makes it pos­si­ble to manip­u­late long inven­to­ries of mate­ri­als to find what you’re look­ing for.
From the tree on the left of the page, you can choose a group of records. From there, the cen­ter of the screen will show a list of every­thing in this group (or sub­group) of records.
To sort them chrono­log­i­cally, click on the “Date” head­ing. You can also sort them alpha­bet­i­cally by click­ing the “Title” head­ing, and sort them into their phys­i­cal arrange­ment by click­ing the “Con­tainer” head­ing.
In some cases, there may be a list within a list — the con­tainer infor­ma­tion will say “Mul­ti­ple Con­tain­ers”. Sim­ply click on that title to see the con­tents held within.

Getting a Broader Understanding of Collections

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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.