Skip to main content

Finding Archives and Manuscripts

Provides an overview of strategies for locating primary sources, including archival and manuscript material.

Using Finding Aids

What is a Finding Aid?

A Finding Aid is an inventory of the materials in a collection; in many cases, it will give a complete list of a collection's contents by box or folder.  So, if you are interested a large collection, such as the UAW's papers at Reuther Library in Detroit, it is extremely helpful if there is a finding aid that will tell you which box or folder would be most relevant to your research.  Finding aids will generally give a list of correspondents, as well as the organizations, projects, and topics that are in a collection.

In the best case scenario, a collection is fully described in a finding aid that can be searched through a database like WorldCat or Archive Finder.  In many cases, however, there might only be minimal description of the collection, and you will need to contact the library directly (or visit the collection in person).

Often you will find finding aids online through a library catalog.

Databases, catalogs, and directories that you can use to find collections (U.S. and International)
https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=283072&p=1885995
guides.lib.umich.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2021-10
58200
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:YR4CA7EM5UITSZ63IXTRZ7JGDIJJN2XI
<urn:uuid:9764b21c-7def-4e16-a269-f03dae797062>
2021-03-04T09:00:55Z
3.86.37.148
text/html
sha1:R4AQ6FSAJEY5HGH77FX4IHYMU27IW4EU
<urn:uuid:626ee46f-6842-4760-88c9-4d5f9054a59f>
https://guides.lib.umich.edu/c.php?g=283072&p=1885995
response
<urn:uuid:16fd6cc5-aace-4f05-a883-0325c06073b8>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2021-10
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for February/March 2021
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-165.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.18 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/