HIST 301: Historian's Craft (Benes, Spring 2025)

The best ways to find archives are to:

• Look at footnotes and citations of other works in your field to determine which archives are being used in similar projects.
• Talk to scholars at conferences to learn about where they are conducting research.
• Subscribe to H-Net channels related to your field; archives and libraries often post notices about newly added or processed collections.
• Contact museums, libraries, and societies located in the geographic area of interest, or with thematic foci similar to your topic. There is a good chance the staff will be able to alert you to collections of interest.

In the print collection, we also have published guides like:

• "The Union : a guide to federal archives relating to the Civil War"
• "The Confederacy : a guide to the archives of the Government of the Confederate States of America"
• "Guide to federal records in the National Archives of the United States"

In truth, print guides have fallen out of fashion, especially with the development of Worldcat and ArchivesGrid

In WorldCat, search as you normally would, then in the results page limit to the "archival" tab. Click on the "Libraries worldwide" tab to indicate where the materials are held. The record should also indicate whether microfilm scans of the material are available. This will help you find individual letters/materials in archives.

This works even better if you subject search, which will point you toward whole collections. Start with keywords first, then move to subjects or title search if you need to limit the results.

Like Worldcat, this database is owned by OCLC (Formerly "Online Computer Library Center," and before that "Ohio College Library Center").

Pros:

• It allows topic, institution, archives, and name searches.
• The map feature allows users to find archival collections in a specific geographic location
• The Summary view is easier to read than WorldCat.

Cons:

• The search features work poorly and the metadata search works poorly.
• Because it keyword searches so much content, there are a LOT of false hits.
• Subject headings don't work well in this interface; they are basically keyword searches, so you receive a LOT of false hits.

Overall

• This is a good resource for researchers who do not have access to WorldCat FirstSearch, but is a much less useful tool. The data is identical but the indexing is worse. The resource can be useful, but WorldCat is far superior. I strongly suggest starting there.