2. HOLLIS, VIA, OASIS, and Catalogs of Libraries Beyond Harvard
HOLLIS
The HOLLIS catalog contains records for over 14 million items: books, journals, sound recordings, manuscripts, films, maps, government documents, and electronic resources held by various libraries at Harvard. For literary researchers at Harvard, it is a core resource. For general information on searching, renewing materials, and other topics related to HOLLIS, use Searching the Online HOLLIS Catalog
Searching for material about authors and their works
To find critical, biographical, or contextual information Search authors' names, last name/first name using Subject beginning with...The entries for prolific or heavily discussed authors will include a range of subheadings that follow the general heading, for example:
Also in this list will be headings for works devoted primarily to discussion of one particular title by that author.
Searching for other literary subjects (literary concepts/movements, genres, genres/periods)
If you do not know the Subject Heading for your search, begin with
Keywords, since Keywords will retrieve all records
containing your search terms and will lead to relevant
resources.
You can then identify the subject headings in the HOLLIS
record of a resource that's of interest, and they will lead to
other useful material.
Note that Keywords anywhere will, indeed, search anywhere
in the HOLLIS record, including contents notes and subject headings.
You can combine genre/period in a keyword search. For example: a
Keyword search American
and short stories and 19th century will lead to records with
Subject Headings such as:
American fiction -- 19th century--History and criticism
Narration
Rhetoric
Finding Manuscript, Archival, and Visual 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
VIA “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.”
Finding Material in Libraries outside of Harvard
WorldCat (the OCLC® Online Union Catalog) 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.”
RLG
Bibliographic File
This database serves as a union catalog for holdings of research libraries
and academic, corporate and national libraries as well as archives, museums
and historical societies worldwide. Over 125 million records for books,
serials, archival collections, manuscripts, sound recordings, films and
videos, photographs and electronic resources are included.
Using Interlibrary Loan
If the Harvard Libraries do not own material you need for your work, you may want to use Interlibrary Loan to request it be borrowed for you from another library. General information on using Interlibrary Loan is available. Or you may want to go directly to the Interlibrary Loan Login Form, register as a borrower, and make a request.
