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Special Collections Home    List of Special Collections    Catalogs and Finding Tools

How do I find out what is in a collection?

The contents of special collections are described in a variety of ways, including:

Summary overviews

To gain a general understanding of the kind of material you can expect to find in a particular special collection at Yale, select the appropriate link below.

American Literature Collection

German Literature Collection

Arts of the Book Collection

Historical Medical Library

Babylonian Collection

Historical Sound Recordings

Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library's General Collection:
Medieval and Renaissance
Modern

James Osborn Collection of English Manuscripts

Center for British Art Collections

Lewis Walpole Library

Divinity Library Special Collections

Manuscripts and Archives

Drama Library

Map Collection

Faber Birren Collection of Books on Color

Music Library Special Collections

Film Study Center

Visual Resources Collection

Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies

Western Americana Collection


For a list of some of the most important published guides to Yale's collections, consult A Selected Bibliography of Printed Catalogs of Collections in the Yale Library. The list is not exhaustive and special collections staff can direct readers to additional published guides.

Catalog records
See the Library's online tutorial Overview of Primary Source Materials: How Yale Describes its Collections to Researchers for tips on how to search for primary source material in Orbis and the card catalogs.
NB: not all Yale collections are represented in Orbis.

Finding aids
The brief descriptions of archival collections that are found in the catalogs are often supplemented by finding aids or inventories that may include information to the level of individual folder headings. Many, but not all, of Yale's finding aids are now available in machine-readable form, and a full-text database of their contents can be searched over the web. For more information consult the Yale University Library Finding Aid Project. Additional archival finding aids are available in paper form at various special collections on campus.

Special catalog tools
In addition to archival finding aids, Yale librarians have created other special catalog tools to identify rare and special materials by form or genre or to provide access to specific kinds of information about the collections: e.g. tracings for bindings, provenance information, imprint files, etc. A list of these special tools as well as instructions for using them can be found at Special Library Catalogs.

Consultation with archivists and curators
In many cases, archivists and curators know much more about particular collections than can be included in catalog records or finding aids.

Back to Frequently Asked Questions



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This file last modified 07/06/07
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