Using early manuscripts at Houghton

If you aren't sure what materials Houghton (or other Harvard repositories) might have that are relevant to your interests, you can use HOLLIS to explore collections. The HOLLIS User Guide's Search Operators and Advanced Search pages will be very helpful for this type of searching. Remember that, no matter how specific your search, you are always limited by the metadata available in the catalog record. For exploratory searching, you may need to try searching from multiple angles.

ADVANCED SEARCH

• Go to HOLLIS Advanced Search. Use search filters as desired, such as limiting to a specific Language, to a Publication Date (i.e., date of production) range, or Resource Type to Archives / Manuscripts.
• An empty search will not work: you need at least one keyword. You can include a content-/subject-related keyword if you’d like (e.g., Catholic or astronom*), or use one of the advanced drop-down filters suggested below.
• If an item is available digitally, its digitized version (whether full or partial, photography or microfilm) will be linked out from the HOLLIS record. If you would like to limit your search to only digitized materials, use the Show Only > Online filter in the search results sidebar.

Tips (from HOLLIS User Guide: Advanced Search)

• Need to search multiple languages? Use the drop-down search facet Code: MARC language.
• Want to search for all materials published in a specific country or countries? Use search facet Code: MARC place of pub. Be mindful that political boundaries have changed since the Middle Ages: for Burgundian works, for example, you might need to search ne OR fr OR be OR lu (Netherlands, France, Belgium, Luxembourg).
• Want to limit to certain repositories? To search just one repository, limit your advanced search to the Library Catalog and modify the Scope to the repository of choice. Or, to search across multiple repositories, use Code: Library + Collection, making sure to include an asterisk after the library code, such as hou* OR div*.