3. Finding Manuscript, Archival, and Visual Materials
Finding Material at Harvard
OASIS “provides centralized access to a small but growing percentage of finding aids for archival and manuscript collections at Harvard. These finding aids are detailed descriptions of collections that contain a wide variety of materials, including letters, diaries, photographs, drawings, printed material, and objects. For each collection described in OASIS there is a summary description in HOLLIS.”
“The Visual Information Access (VIA) system is a union catalog of visual resources at Harvard. It includes information about slides, photographs, objects and artifacts in the university's libraries, museums and archives. This system represents the first phase of an ongoing effort and additional information will be added on a regular basis. Check the repository's web sites for more information about access policies and coverage for their visual collections.”
**Note: You can use HOLLIS Expanded Search and limit by library location to search for items in collections in individual libraries, such as Houghton Library.
Finding Material in Other Libraries
WorldCat is a reference resource with over 45 million bibliographic records representing 400 languages. WorldCat covers information dating back to the 11th century and includes holdings information from libraries in 45 countries. Records for books, serials and other media (visual and sound recordings) are included and can be used as search limits in “Advanced Search.”
Karlsruhe is a metasearch interface that allows searching of multiple sources, including German union catalogs, other national library catalogs and selected booktrade catalogs.
Using the metasearch engine can yield idiosyncratic results, since title keywords are used. If retrievals are not what you expected to find, click on the link for the individual catalog and try the search there. For example, for France, the national library catalog includes the BNF’s Catalogue of printed books and periodicals; for Spain, the Catalog "Libros modernos" (1831 -) of the National Library of Spain and for Italy, Database "Libro Moderno" contains about 3,400,000 books and 203,000 periodicals since 1830.
The European LibraryThis site links to online services (public access catalogs, bibliographies, etc.), online exhibitions, and information related to international projects and initiatives.
