#FindingAidFriday
If you are familiar with our Archives department, you might already know that not all of the archival or manuscript materials in our collections are online.  In fact, only a small portion of our materials are available as digitized content through our digital collections.  However, a good portion of our collections have tools for discovering and identifying what’s relevant to your research available online.  These are called finding aids, and they are openly available, searchable, and even broadly discoverable through our own website as well as web tools like ArchiveGrid. Â
Despite this, we find that most new researchers aren’t super familiar with or confident about using finding aids.  Let’s face it, archives can be intimidating and confusing. It doesn’t help that sometimes archivists and librarians toss around discipline-specific jargon and things get more complicated.
Don’t worry, we’ve got your back and we are here to help! Why? Because archives are meant to be used and we want to help you use them! We want you to discover a little bit more about the collections we have available at our institution.
Start by checking out this video that guides you through the process of searching within a finding aid. Many thanks to our very own Reference and Instruction Specialist, Heidi, who created this video!
