Alphabetical Indexes to Manuscript and Visual Collections

| A | B | C | D | E | F | G | H | I | J | K | L | M | N | O | P | Q | R | S | T | U | V | W | X | Y | Z |

The Indiana Historical Society library holds approximately 7,500 manuscript and visual collections, each ranging in size from one item to many boxes. Online collection guides or collection descriptions (not the actual items) for approximately 1,500 of these collections are accessible on this website. If you know the name of the collection you are looking for, you can use the alphabetical indexes above. Collections that have online guides are shown as hyperlinks. Those that do not have online guides are shown as plain text.

Two lists of recently processed collections are also available: collections processed in 2007 and 2008. You may also want to use the library's Online Public Access Catalog for subject/title/author or keyword searches of the library's holdings.

Keyword Searches

If you do not know an exact name or want to see all the references to any name or term in the online collection guides and indexes, you can do a keyword search. The searches below will limit their results to collection guides for manuscript and visual collections, containing tens of thousands of pages of detailed information.

From any screen on the IHS website, find the SEARCH button at the upper right-hand corner. You will be inserting your search terms in the box to its left. First, delete the phrase "Keyword Search..." in the box; leaving it there will narrow the search to documents containing these words.

The key to searching through collection guides only is to use the term processed in each search. This is because "processed" is a word that appears in all collection guides, and appears in very few other files on the website.

Use a single word, combination of words, or phrase as search terms. If you use a phrase, place it it quotation marks. Thus, for example, a search for manuscript and visual collection guides dealing with the Civil War and religion would be input as:

"Civil War" religion processed

The retrieved records will contain the terms "Civil War" and "religion," though not necessarily near each other.

A search for the geographical name Greencastle would be input as:

Greencastle processed

And a search for the surname Collins would be input as:

Collins processed

You can also used the Boolean OR (always capitalized) to retrieve wider groups. Putting in the text:

"civil rights" OR "human rights" processed

will retrieve any collection guides that have either the term "civil rights" or the term "human rights" in them. (Using a lowercase "or" will not retrieve any results.)

In all these cases, the search will produce a list of titles, and you can click on each one in turn. Most retrieved titles for collection guides for manuscript and visual collections will be in ALL CAPITAL letters and will contain terms like PAPERS, RECORDS, LETTER, DIARY, or COLLECTION.

Click on each of these to see the collection guide, and use your browser's "back" key to return to the list. Because terms inside collection guides are indexed (not just titles of documents) you need to do another search with each document, using your browser's "find" command, to find each instance of the term you input.

All manuscript and visual collections at the Indiana Historical Society are available for use in the William Henry Smith Library, and library staff can also provide additional information on them to remote researchers. Please see www.indianahistory.org/library/reference.html for more information.