With our new digital collections website, we tried to provide a variety of options to search it. I’ll highlight two ways to do that.

On the menu at the top, you can select “Explore Collections.” This will take you to an A-Z list of all of the collections on the website. This method works well if you know the name of the collection that you are looking for.

If you don’t know the name of the collection you want, you can also select by themes. If you want material that is not related to the university’s history, select “Special Collections” on the menu. We have grouped our collections thematically ranging from American Civil War to Medical Humanities and much more. We have also highlighted collections that we maintain with stakeholders like the Houston Asian American Archive and the White House Scientist and Science Policy Dynamic Digital Archive.

After selecting a theme, you’ll arrive at a page listing the collections with a bit of information about each one.

Finally, by clicking on a collection, you’ll usually encounter a description of the materials, a short biography or other background information, and ways to access the finding aid/inventory for the collection. Depending on the collection, you might even encounter a blue button that will point you to more information. The Aaron Martin letters have been mapped, so the button redirects you to a StoryMap.

Depending on the size of the collection, you can decide how to sort the items (by title or date). You can also filter by date on the left hand side.
Here’s a look at the University Archives. There are fewer themes, but we’ve tried to select themes that alums, faculty, staff, and more want to find like oral histories, videos, radio broadcasts, yearbooks, and the student newspaper.

Next time, we’ll explore other ways to search the using the search box, advanced search, and the search categories on the home page.