HOLLIS

HOLLIS

HOLLIS is Harvard's online search engine for our physical and online collections. There are three different options for searching:

  • HOLLIS searches books, journals, videos, images, government documents, manuscripts, digital resources, etc. It searches the full text of archival finding aids.
  • Everything combines these two searches into one.

Search Tips

  • Use quotes "" to keep words together as a phrase, thus "shell shock" rather than shell shock which is searched as shell AND shock
  • Words are automatically truncated. Thus when Creationism is searched, Creation is also searched.  Use quotes ("") to turn off automatic truncation: "Creationism".
  • Use Boolean operators (AND, OR, NOT) to do complex searches: e.g., (“electronic surveillance” OR eavesdropping) AND privacy. 
    • Note that OR and AND must be in caps. 
  • Find all forms of a word with wildcards. ? matches a single character and * matches multiple characters: e.g., feminis?; gene* therapy
    • Note: Phrase searches cannot include wildcards, and you cannot use a wildcard at the beginning of a word).

Finding Books:

A keyword search (Everything tab) limited to Books (either pre-search – adjust ‘Limit to: Any resource type’ to ‘Limit to: Books’; or post-search – ‘Refine My Results: Resource Type: Books’) yields numerous book chapters and books not available at Harvard.  To find books available via the Harvard Library, use 'Show Only' at the top of the left-hand column on the Results page.  Note that you can limit here to books not in Harvard Depository.

For more on HOLLIS

To do a systematic topic search in HOLLIS, search any reasonable keywords, choose pertinent records, and look at the subject terms. These are terms chosen by the Library of Congress to express the subject matter of the book.

When you can locate a a good subject term, use it to generate additional research leads.  Subject terms in HOLLIS+ are linked; click on one and you'll see all the other items that have been "tagged" the same way.

Examples of Subject Terms

  • African Americans -- Civil rights
  • African Americans -- History -- 1964-
  • Busing for school integration
  • Civil rights movements -- United States
  • Civil rights workers -- United States -- Biography
  • Protest movements -- United States
  • United States -- Race relations
  • United States -- Social conditions -- 1960-1980

Subject Browsing:

Select the "Starts with/Browse" option and Browse by Subject

Primary Source Terms:

Several of these added terms (called subdivisions) indicate primary sources:

  • --Archives
  • --Biography (Includes autobiographies as well as (secondary) third person biographies)
  • --Correspondence
  • --Description and travel
  • --Diaries
  • --Interviews
  • --Manuscripts
  • --Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
  • --Personal narratives
  • --Sermons
  • --Sources (usually refers to collections of published primary sources)