Finding Special Collections Materials in the PAC

Did you know that Special Collections has over 60,000 items in our Rare Book Collections? While that number may seem daunting, it's easy to find our materials in the library catalog. From the PAC home page, click on Words. Type any combination of your keywords into the fields provided. Then, under Location, choose "Special Collections." At this point, you can click Search, or you can add some more limits to the search, like Language or Material Type, or Year. Try adding a date range to find Special Collections materials from a particular time period.

Say you wanted to see everything we have published during a particular date range. Use two asterisks (**) in the first keyword field instead of a keyword. For example, you can search for everything we have published in the seventeenth century.

Though the majority of our manuscript collections primarily support American history, our book collections span centuries, subjects, and languages, and can support almost any research field, from modern European History to Victorian England to the Islamic World. Play around with keywords and date ranges that interest you, browse around through our titles--you might find some surprises!