Tutorial

Because the American Memory collections are so large, understanding how to find documents in them is an important skill. Fortunately, the Library of Congress provides several ways of searching its collections.

Consider the African-American Perspectives, 1818-1907 collection, which contains 351 titles. It would be laborious to simply look at a list of the titles and guess what the more obscure pamphlets might contain and even more time consuming to try and skim through each one.

This collection, like most of the other American Memory collections, offers three ways to search its holdings: Search by Keywords, Browse Author Index, and Browse Subject Index. These choices appear at the collection's home page. Go to the ones for African-American Perspectives, 1818-1907, and then return for examples of what these techniques reveal.

There are two ways to Search by Keywords. The first is to search Descriptive Information. By typing in a keyword, the search engine will locate that keyword in each pamphlet's bibliographic information. For example, the keyword "negro," a frequently used term of the era, shows 64 pamphlets that contain this word. Another historical term, "Afro-American," shows 100 places where the term is used, sometimes in the title of the pamphlet but also in the subject headings used by the Library of Congress. "African-American" also shows 100 listings, but many of them are from different pamphlets since this term, and not "Afro-American," is the one used in the pamphlet descriptions provided by the Library of Congress.

A little practice helps with the understandable confusion. Remember that the keyword you type to begin a search can appear in different bibliographic places (pamphlet title, LC subject heading, LC pamphlet description). You may need different keywords to get at the same idea.

A collection can also be searched with the Search Full Text option, the difference being that the keyword entered will be located within the text of the pamphlet itself. Of course, the word(s) may be used in very different contexts. "Frederick Douglass," for example, results in pamphlets eulogizing his life, an address given at a hospital named after him, and one of his own speeches.

A second way to locate documents is to Browse either the Subject Index or the Author Index.

The Subject Index will often contain multiple listings for the same document. The pamphlet found under "Addresses-North Carolina-Greensboro-1898" is also found under "Negroes-Education." Browsing the subject index can help an uncertain researcher determine exactly what he/she is interested in pursuing.

The Author Index is most helpful for finding a particular name. The introductory description of African-American Perspectives, 1818-1907 lists several prominent African-Americans represented in the collection who can then be located in the author index. Looking up "Frederick Douglass" shows that the collection has seven of his speeches printed in pamphlet form.

Further tips for locating documents can be found on each of the search and browse pages located in the American Memory collections.

Now, continue to a practice exercise.