You can search collections directly from Archives at Yale's landing page. To return to this search box from anywhere on the site, click on the Search icon in the top menu bar.
By default, Archives at Yale will retrieve results matching your search terms from all types of records in its database. An icon identifies each record type. Your results may include:
If you want to search collection-level information only, find the option "Limit to collections" in the drop-down menu under "Search all record types".
With "Limit to collections", Archives at Yale will search for matches in collection-level fields (Title, Description of the Papers, Biographical / Historical Note, Subjects, etc). In the ArchivesSpace back-end, it queries resource records, but not accession records. Therefore, a "Limit to collections" search will not return matches from unprocessed materials.
A drop-down menu offers 5 search field options :
The main search box, and the Filter Results box allow you to limit your search to specific years. They will limit results to those with date spans overlapping with the years you input as parameters.
Beware that the collection or component date(s) may not exactly match your search parameter. For example, a search limited to the years 1800-1870 may return a collection spanning the years 1780-1850 or 1810-1905.
Searching From: 1800 To: [blank] = 1800 to present, while searching From: [blank] to 1800 = the earliest we have until 1800.
Search within results:
Search within collections:
[Warning: Currently, if you enter multiple terms in the Search within Results and the Search Collection boxes, results will contain ANY of the words. These boxes do OR searches instead of AND (like the main search box). This is a known issue and under investigation.]
Punctuation: is stripped during the query, whether you are using quotation marks or not. Therefore, including or not including hyphens in personal names, or dashes in subject headings, does not impact search results.
Diacritics: are supported but not necessary. For example, searching "Jean Francois Bory" will return the Jean-François Bory Papers.
Stemming: Archives at Yale automatically performs basic stemming on searches (e.g. searching for cats will also retrieve cat).
Wildcards: “Wildcard” symbols ? and * help retrieve a greater number of relevant results by searching for variant spellings and forms of the term concurrently.
Searches are not case-sensitive.
Alternative to boolean operator NOT: precede a term by a hyphen to exclude it from the search (e.g. mission -China ; art -British).
Finding near terms: Archives at Yale does not support the boolean operator NEAR. However, to find terms within a specified number of words of one another, add a tilde (~) and a number after the search terms. (e.g. “maps Asia”~5 will return results where the term maps occurs within 5 words of the term Asia).