Primary Source Designs for Learning Handbook

Exploration 8: Three Strategies for Searching in American Memory, Part 2

1. Search across All Collections

The Search all collections box is like using a microscope to look through a huge group of trunks that contain collections created by many different people over hundreds of years. “Search all collections” uses details from bibliographic information in all of the American Memory Collections. Using key words in the “Search all collections” box may narrowly limit the results.  There may be many other items of interest to the researcher that were cataloged with different key words.

• The “Search all collections” box is very useful to:

  • Find collections that contain items related to a topic, and then search within those collections.

  • Get a sense of what is available.

  • Search with keywords or names to locate specific items and collections of interest.

  • See thumbnail pictures of the items by clicking on Galley View.

    Search with many synonyms related to the key words already used.