Literary Research in Harvard Libraries

Find a specific person's papers and books

• Use a biography to find out where the papers are
  • Critical biographies are encyclopedia-style entries that often include information about where the bulk of a person's letters and manuscripts are held.
    • Tips on how to find critical biographies.
  • Book-length biographies draw on extensive research with primary sources: check the acknowledgments, notes, and citations to find out which collections and repositories the biographer visited. To find biographies, add biography as a subject term to your HOLLIS search.
    • Example search: "Soyinka, Wole" AND biography
• SNAC (Social Networks and Archival Context) is a person-based search for archival collections around the world. It works best if your person is represented in only a few archives.
  • Search SNAC.
• To identify first editions, sort your HOLLIS results by date oldest, or find a bibliography that lists all of the person's publications.
  • Example search: author="spenser, edmund" AND sort=date oldest
  • Example search: subject="spenser, edmund" AND bibliography
• To find out more about what a person read, search HOLLIS for the author's name plus subject terms "books and reading" or library.
  • Example search: subject="Melville, herman" AND ("books and reading" OR library)

Find more details and additional methods on the history liaisons' Guide for Finding Manuscripts and Archival Collections.

Understand a particular moment

Search newspapers and Magazines

• Use HOLLIS to find access to a specific magazine or newspaper: make sure to check the full list of access options in the record details.
  • Example search: Saturday Evening Post
• Use HOLLIS Databases to find a full-text collection of historical newspapers or magazines that you can search. Specify a region or time period and add journals OR newspapers OR magazines OR periodicals.
  • Example search: 19th AND (journals OR newspapers OR magazines OR periodicals
• Understand which magazines and newspapers would have been most relevant, with one of the guides to periodicals in Widener's Loker Reading room (call number RR 655 and following)
  • Virtual browse of the Loker Reading Room from RR 655
• Browse the stacks---general periodicals from the 19th and 20th centuries are under Old Widener P (level D-West) and on Lamont Level A

Find more details and additional methods on the history liaisons' guides to Periodicals and Newspapers

Images, Audio, and Video

• Find a database - explore collections of material that you won't find in HOLLIS
  • Example search: radio
• Filter your HOLLIS search - "Resource type" options include film/video, sound, and images
  • Example search: victorian interior, filtered to "images"
  • Example search: victorian interior pictorial ("pictorial works" are books with lots of images in them, like a coffee table book)
• For poetry readings
  • Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room
  • PennSound
• Search public websites
  • The Internet Archive has tons of historical media
  • YouTube - use YouTube's own search box for better results
  • Advice on finding podcasts from University of Toronto libraries

Explore Harvard collections for inspiration

Houghton Library: A Student's Guide gives you a sense of how to explore a special collection at Harvard.

• Search HOLLIS (limit to Library Catalog) or HOLLIS for Archival Discovery
• Explore Collections and Library home pages on library.harvard.edu to get a sense of our collecting areas
• Consult with the experts at Harvard's Fine Arts, Music, and Performing Arts collections