In our last post about searching, we talked about how to look through items specifically in the MHL collections and through the MHL’s Internet Archive website. But you might also be looking for items with, so to speak, a broader net and want to use the Archive’s larger search functions.
From the Archive’s main page, you can do a very general search in the box at the top of the page that will cover everything and anything in the Archive’s collections. This is a great way to find out what the Archive has on a given topic or person and it works well to generate a list of items you can browse through.
If something more directed is what you had in mind, you can select a specific collection from the dropdown box on the right:
This may be most helpful if you’re looking for a given title, author, person, or subject. Reading the background on the various collections might also be useful in giving you a better idea of where something is likely to be found; for information on the WayBack Machine, the Archive itself, and some of the Moving Image collections, check out the FAQ. For more on the text projects, including American Libraries and Canadian Libraries, have a look at the Welcome page. And for more on the audio projects housed by the Archive, including the Naropa Poetics Audio Archive and Librivox, check out the project page.
If you have a title you’re looking for from the MHL collections, for example, the fastest way to find it through the main-page search function is to type as much as you know of the title into the search box and select “American Libraries” from the dropdown.
If you know only part of the title, for example, “journal of the Harvard Medical School,” try placing it in quotations, exactly as it appears in this post. The quotation marks will tell the search engine to look for the words as a phrase, rather than as individual words.
For more tips on searching the MHL, check out our MHL @ Internet Archive page and as always, for more from the Medical Heritage Library, please visit our full collection!