Because Orbis is a catalogue of all of Yale University Library’s holdings, it contains all collections and items in Archives at Yale and more. It contains slightly different search fields than Archives at Yale, the most useful of which will be described below.

Quicksearch works similarly to Orbis and also contains all library holdings. For archival research purposes, use "Books+" and limit to "Archives and Manuscripts"

Keyword

• Depending on what you type into the search bar, you’ll probably get a lot of results and can start narrowing results with the built in filters.

• A keyword search looks for words anywhere in the record, prioritizing records with your keywords in the title or author section.

• This doesn’t work the same as Google, which can search for phrases and topics you type in the search bar.

• Example:

  • DO search “civil rights movement” and then use the subjects or names filters to find materials from people who were active in the movement

  • DON’T search “people alive during the Civil Rights Movement”

Title

• Use this if you know the partial or full title of the item or collection you want to find.

Author

• Always put in the name as “lastname, firstname” because the author search is an index search, like looking up something in the back of a textbook.

Call number

• Use this if you know the call number of the exact item you want. There’s two call number search options: Library of Congress (LC) and Local. 
• Use the Library of Congress call number option if you know the call number of an item but aren’t sure if Yale has the item.

Subject Browse and Special Collections Subject

• Use this if you know the exact subject of what you’re looking for. Subject searches are controlled vocabulary .
• Try different iterations of a search term if you don’t find enough relevant results with your first subject search!

Quick Limits

• This can only be used for keyword and title searches. The most useful for you as someone doing primary source research, the limit “Archives and Manuscripts” would be the most useful.

Scope and Contents

• Provides a narrative of what’s in a collection.
• Read this section to get a basic description of the search result, and why it’s relevant to your search terms and filters.

PDF Finding Aid

• Gives you instructions on requesting materials.
• See a static document style list of all the information found in the web page view.

Finding Aid View

• Lists the box and folder you can find an exact item in, with link to request a box directly from here.
• See everything in a scrollable, interactive hierarchical format.

Container List

• Shows a list view of boxes or containers in this collection.
• Click on a box link to see what is in each box. For example, if you've seen this collection before and found something important in Box 7 but can't remember what it was, click on "Box 7" to see a list of its contents.

Narrowing results in a collection

• Use the “Search Collection” search bar to locate your search term within the collection description or to limit a search to one collection
• Use filters within a collection search results list to narrow down material you want to see instead of requesting and sifting through the whole collection.
• Use the collection’s “Series” to narrow down types of materials or subjects within a collection.