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USHMM Collections Search Help

Accessing Digitized Materials Remotely

Published Materials

Click here to browse or to search digitally accessible published materials. Some of these materials are freely available and some are behind a paywall.

Click here to browse or search a subset of digitized published materials that are freely available to all and are hosted at Internet Archive or USHMM as well as a number of Yizkor books.

Archival Documents

Click here to browse or search over 1,700 fully digitized archival collections, comprising over 700,000 page images of digitized materials from the Museum's collection, mostly personal papers.

Oral History Testimony

Click here to browse or search over 17,300 digitized video or audio oral histories, comprising over 33,000 hours of streamable testimony.

Historical Film

Click here to browse or search over 4,200 digitized historical film records, comprising over 970 hours.

Photographs

Click here to browse or search over 34,000 digitized historical photographs.

Objects with Photographs

Click here to browse or search over 12,500 objects in the Museum's collection with photographs.

Using Search

Boolean Search Support

Collections Search supports boolean queries including AND, NOT, and OR (which must be uppercase) and parentheses. For example, searching: york NOT ("new york" OR "memorial books") would bring records that include the term "york" but exclude records containing either "new york" or "memorial books".

  • Use quotation marks to search as a phrase.
  • Use "NOT" before a word or phrase to exclude.
  • Use "OR", "AND", and "NOT" to create complex boolean logic. You can use parentheses in your complex expressions.
  • Truncation and wildcards are not supported. Word-stemming is done automatically.

Filtering Your Search

Use the facets to filter your search and narrow your results. The facets are located on the home page under the search box and also to the left of your search results under the "Filter Your Search" heading.

Limiting Search to Specific Fields

Entering terms in the search box will return results where those terms occur anywhere in the record.

To find records where your search terms are found in specific fields, use the "All Fields" dropdown to the right of the search box. Change the selection in this dropdown menu from "All Fields" to Title, Author, Date, Identifiers, or Subjects and Keywords.

Using Advanced Search

Click on "Advanced Search" in the main navigation to access the Advanced Search. Here, you will find additional searching options which may be especially helpful for academic researchers.

Search by Record Type

Near the bottom of the Advanced Search screen, there are a number of additional facets to filter your search. In the Record Type facet, you can limit your search to documents, film, names sources, objects, oral histories, photographs, or publications. Select one or more record type to limit your search results to these record types only. For example, if you were interested in finding only photographs and objects, you could check both "Photograph" and "Object" and then click the Search button to run your Advanced Search.

Searching for Names and Places

Names

To search for a person's name, it is best to use full names, not nicknames.

Places

Collections Search includes a "geographic name expansion" feature. Often the same place is referred through different names in different languages and various spellings and transliterations. For example, searching for "Lviv", "L'viv", "L'vov", "Lvov", "Lwow", or "Lemberg" will all bring you the same results. Similarly, searching for "Łódź", "Lodz", or "Litzmannstadt" will bring the same results, as will searching for "Munich", "München", or "Muenchen."

To find more obscure geographic places, it is best to search within all fields.