Tag Archives: contents

Request a Particular Box within a Collection

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Sometimes, researchers who have visited before know exactly which box within a collection they want to see. They may prefer to search for that box rather than looking through the whole finding aid to find it.

Luckily, there’s a very easy way to do this. Once you’re in the finding aid for the collection that you want to see, search for “Box X” (with X, of course, being the box number you’re looking for).

Search for a box within a collection. Be sure to surround your search with quotation marks.

Search for a box within a collection. Be sure to surround your search with quotation marks.

And the results of your search will return records contained in the box you specified.

Here, you see records that are in box 135 of the Harold Medina papers.

Here, you see records that are in box 135 of the Harold Medina papers.

And to request these items, click on the title to go to the entry in the finding aid and click the button that says “Request this Box.”

As always, don’t hesitate to call or email us if you have questions about this process.

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.