Understand What HOLLIS Is

HOLLIS is the Harvard Library’s main search tool. It enables you to search across subjects, languages, time periods, and information formats.

The Catalog & Articles search searches the catalog plus billions of citations. Or you can choose Library Catalog from the drop-down to limit to Harvard collections.

Choose Catalog & Articles if:

  • You want to explore the broadest variety of sources
  • Your topic is very interdisciplinary or very current
  • You already have the title of an article you want

Choose Library Catalog if:

  • You want book-length treatments of a topic
  • You’re looking for Harvard collections in particular
  • You need reliable filters for authors and subjects

Know How to Build Good Searches

Creating search strings with some of the techniques below can help you get better results up front.

conventions to use quotation marks, Boolean operators, truncation with an asterisk, parenthesis for synonyms

Take Control of Your Search Results

While searching HOLLIS you may sometimes find yourself overwhelmed by either the numbers or types of results your search returns. If this happens, try one of these tricks to bring your results into sharper focus:

1. Limit "Catalog & Articles" results using the PEER REVIEWED ARTICLES filter.

  • You'll raise the visibility of scholarly journal articles in your results, and eliminate newspaper/magazine articles and books .

2. Limit your results to publications from the last 5, 10, 15, or 20 years.

  • You'll get a snapshot of the most recent research trends and scholarly approaches in a field (or around a particular issue).

3. Add a keyword (or keywords) to indicate what you're after

  • Examples: 
    • Handbook or companion or encyclopedia are common words to help identify good background or overview sources. Reader, anthology, collect* (to pick up collection and collected) are also commonly used for books that bring together significant readings on a subject by one or more  researchers. 
    • Criticism or interpretation are words that will bring up secondary source studies of a book, film, artwork, musical piece, artist or writer, etc. 
    • History is a way to get at full-length studies not just of countries or events, but also of ideas and concepts and broad subjects. 
    • Debate or controversy (or controvers*), or contested or disputed are words that will often help you surface works that identify the "stakes" of a particular argument, action, conclusion, etc. Political scientists like the word puzzle -- so consider. trying that word, too, if your topic angles that way.
    • Theory or theoretical or philosophy or philosophical are terms that sometimes help surface works in larger contexts or examined via a "lens" of some kind. 
    • Case study or interview or qualitative might angle towards social science and away from the popular culture/humanistic research.

4. Limit your search results using the BOOKS or BOOK CHAPTERS filters.

  • Your numbers will immediately get smaller. And with book chapters, you may discover a great resource that you might not have seen by relying solely on the titles of books.

Getting PDFs From Us

Scan and Deliver

When an article you find in HOLLIS is not owned at Harvard, or is available in a printed journal volume but not online, you can ask us to make a PDF for you through a service called Scan and Deliver. This service is also an option if you want up to two chapters of any Harvard-owned book digitized for your use.

Tracking Down Other Copies of Books

If a book you need is not owned by the Harvard Library or is not currently available from the Library, use Interlibrary Loan/Borrow Direct to request a copy from another library.