Do you realize what a wealth of libraries and information collections we're surrounded by in the Triangle? There's UNC, Duke, NC State, NCCU, Saint Augustine's, Shaw, Wake Tech, Peace, and Meredith. That's a lot of higher education!

ArchiveGrid, at http://archivegrid.org/web/jsp/index.jsp, allows you to search for the hidden treasures that many college and institutional libraries have in the form of special collections and items. While ArchiveGrid doesn't allow you to search the content of the items itself (and wouldn't THAT be nice) it has aggregated over one million collection descriptions and allows you to search them by keyword. ArchiveGrid is free through May 31; if they're able to get a grant or other sources of funding, it'll stay free indefinitely.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to search this and get a list of all the participating institutions in NC that have collections relevant to your topic of interest? Unfortunately ArchiveGrid falls down a bit in the local search department, but you can fix that, as you'll see in a minute.

If you go to ArchiveGrid you'll get an overview of the collection and a search box. Let's do a search for "North Carolina". Now take a look at the search results.



You'll notice that the results on the first page are mostly from North Carolina institutions, including UNC, Duke, and the North Carolina Nurses Association. But if you look in the "locations" box on the left side of the page, you'll see that there are results for the phrase "North Carolina" from archive collections all over the world! You can get a little bit of information on the results page, but if you click on the title of the collection in the results you'll get a lot more information, including a description of the collection, how to contact the institution that holds the collection, whether there are any restrictions on the collection, and so forth.

But back to the question of local versus international. Perhaps you don't want results from all over the world. Perhaps you just want results to which you can get in your car and drive within a few hours. In that case you want to limit your result by location. You can browse through locations on ArchiveGrid, but it's a little faster to just hack the URL.

Hack the URL? Am I asking you to do something illegal? Not at all. What you're going to do is cut and paste some text to the end of the result URL, which will limit the search results to just North Carolina.

Let's do another search, this time for "Isabella Cannon". Isabella Cannon was the first female mayor or Raleigh, serving from 1977-1979. (She also worked for WRAL radio.) Here's what the results look like.



You'll get two results, one for a collection at UNC and one citing a collection in Georgia! Now, look at the URL for that result and paste the following text at the end of the URL, making sure there's no space between the end of the URL and the text you're pasting:

&l=%22United+States+-+North+Carolina%22

Now hit enter. The page will refresh and you should have only one result, and this one from UNC. Any time you're searching on ArchiveGrid and want to limit your results to just North Carolina, all you have to do is paste that text to the end of a result URL.

Seem a little silly to limit your results to just North Carolina when you only had a couple to start with? Try doing a search for Raleigh and then cut your results down using the text above. You'll go from over 1700 results to just over 500 in a couple of clicks!

It's fun to just browse around and see what's available at ArchiveGrid, but if you want to get down to it and see what kind of collections are available in our area, that little line of text makes it very easy to do. Have fun!