Indiana University Finding Aids

• Home

• Browse

• Search

• Advanced Search

• Help

Welcome to Archives Online at Indiana University

This site is a portal for accessing descriptions of Special Collections and Archives - ones chiefly containing materials other than books - from libraries, archives, and other units at Indiana University Bloomington and from other institutions around the state of Indiana.

As descriptions of items in such collections, such as correspondence, diaries, photographs, and audiovisual materials, do not generally appear in IUCAT (IU's online catalog), Archives Online at IU offers access to these detailed collection guides to assist you in determining the content of a collection and whether it will fulfill your research needs. Archives Online at IU includes a variety of different types of collection descriptions (also called finding aids) with various levels of detail. In addition, collection guides may include links to digital images of items in the collections. Some collections are digitized entirely; others only partially, and some not at all.

Archives Online at IU guides also provide specific contact information for the institution or unit that maintains the resources. This will allow you to connect with archivists, librarians and curators in order to learn more about a collection and how to gain physical access to the materials.

Technical Information

Collection descriptions in Archives Online at IU are encoded according to the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) format. For more information about EAD activities at Indiana University's Digital Library Program (DLP) and documentation about the process used to encode collection descriptions at IU, visit the EAD page of the DLP website.

Online collection descriptions are also available from The IUPUI University Library's Ruth Lilly Special Collections & Archives.