This Guide provides access to finding aids, not to copies of the documents in our collections; in other words, it resembles a library catalog in that it contains descriptions of our holdings but not their full text (e.g., author and title of a book that we own, but not the whole book).
If you have a certain topic in mind, begin with the index. You can do an interactive search by typing key words into the box on our home page. This index produces a list of lines from a database that contains all of our public inventories. To see a line in context, choose the code at the beginning of the line.
The alphabet buttons on our "Notre Dame Archives Guide" page provide access to an index of Guide entries (general descriptions), an index based on Library of Congress subject headings. Choose the appropriate letter of the alphabet. Once inside the index for that letter, search for your topic. Under your topic, choose each reference number in turn and read the corresponding Guide entry. If more detailed finding aids exist, you will find links to them in the codes at the end of each Guide entry.
If you want to find out if we have a whole collection of papers or records having to do with a certain person, organization, or department, choose the appropriate lists (University Records or Other Collections in the Archives) and search them for the name you are seeking. Each list contains links to Guide entries or more specific finding aids.
We have developed Java versions of our interactive search programs, which allow you to accumulate answers from a series of searches and eliminate inappropriate answers from the list. For the Java program that searches our new index, choose Retrieve.
You can also do interactive searches of other databases, including our Calendar (abstracts of individual documents), a list of early students at Notre Dame, a list of minims (grade school students), a list of early faculty, an index to the student newspaper (the Observer), an index to a student magazine (the Scholastic), and an index to Notre Dame press releases. A search of the general index does not include these databases. Some pages have their own interactive search facility (e.g., the list of university records in the archives and the page for Notre Dame's Department of News and Information). These searches produce limited subsets of what you would have found had you used the general index.
You should set your WWW browser to save to a file so that it will not try to display the data on your computer screen.