Help
Help with Digital Collections
If you need immediate assistance, please check the Library Help page 24/7 for options!
Since most of our Digital Collections material is held by Special Collections and Archives, please check their Policies page for information about reproduction requests, copyright, and offensive content policies.
Finding Items
Our content is organized as distinct individual collections that present items together with important contextual information. However, there is a variety of ways to discover items relevant to your research.
- Digital Collections Search: our custom search tool can be used to query items across all our digital collections. Our index includes complete metadata and full text for all items. This is the best option for finding individual items across our holdings based on keywords and filtering using facet fields.
- Collections Browse: Visit our browse features to explore individual collection descriptions. This is a good option when the coverage of collection matches your topics of interest.
- Search engines: We provide rich markup encouraging search engines to index our content. Most people are familiar with Google which can be a powerful tool for discovering relevant content!
Citing Collection Items
Primary sources found in our Digital Collections should be cited appropriately when used in research and publications. Citation formats vary depending on the discipline, but please provide adequate information for others to identify the original source and a link to the web page.
Each Item page in our digital collections has attribution and rights information provided at the bottom of the item information section in cards. Please use the suggested citation as a base.
Report Issues
If you discover issues in our Digital Collections such as broken links, non-working files, incorrect item details, incomplete information, or out of date content, please let us know! We welcome your feedback and help.
The best way to report issues or provide feedback is to use the contact form link provided on every page on our sites. On Item pages, look for the button that says “Contact us about this record” found at the bottom of the item information section. It will look like:
Contact us about this record (opens a new window)
All other pages will have a button available in the footer on the bottom right that looks like:
Click on the link, fill in the form with as much specific detail as possible (including sources or how to recreate the issue), and be sure to provide an email address if you would like a response.
The information you provide will be reviewed by members of our Digital Collections Team. We regularly make updates based on feedback, but please be aware that this process may take significant time and not all information can be incorporated into the digital collection context.