Primary Sources A listing of over 2800 Web sites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar. Includes repositories in the United States, Canada, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Africa and the Near East. Maintained by the University of Idaho Special Collections. A standard practice of archival institutions is to catalog their collections in an on-line catalog, much like what we have at Delta State in the form of Merlin . The collection as a whole, not individual letters and documents, are cataloged.
Many repositories contribute copies of their manuscript cataloging to joint databases.
By searching these databases, one can search the holdings of several repositories at a time. Therefore, you can find if there are collections that relate to your topic and where they might be. Then, you can contact the repository with citations in-hand. The sites and publications listed above are such joint publications. Be aware, however, that not all repositories contribute to these and they are not necessarily current.