Many pages in our guides will suggest that you search in our online catalog ARCHIE (named to honor long-time CHM archivist Archie Motley). It's a great way to find out more information about our collection before visiting or to find collections to explore when you are here. Here are a few tips to help you navigate ARCHIE, finding aids, and inventories.
Don't forget--the staff is here to help you. Don't hesitate to ask for assistance or send an email to research@chicagohistory.org.
ARCHIE does not search the full text of a given item, but searches the catalog records for a specified group of subject headings, words in the title, author names, and descriptions. You may need to think of broader search terms. A search for “women’s liberation,” for example, brings up only 19 hits. But “feminism” brings up 90.
If you find a catalog record for a good source, look at the subject headings listed for that book or document, and try searches on those subjects—often that will lead you to other useful sources.
The catalog has fuzzy searching. If you ask for hats it will bring up an entry with the word hat and vice versa. If you want to search only for an exact spelling of a word, put that word in quotations. For instance, if you search for "hat" you will only get results for hat but not hats.
If the spelling variation might be more than one or two letters different, try searching for multiple variations with the keyword search.
The search generally ignores punctuation, such as apostrophes, hyphens, and the like. A search for "Field's” will bring up the same hits as a search for “fields.” “Anti-war” will bring up the same records as “anti war” (and will regard it as two separate words, so be sure to use quotation marks or ask for exact phrase).
ARCHIE will have trouble with some punctuation like colons and semicolons, though. If you have one of those in your search and are not getting results, try taking that particular punctuation out.
Utilize options from the drop-down “Everything” to select a material or collection type (such as only prints and photographs), and options from the drop-down “All Fields” to search for terms in a specific field (such as a title).
Advanced Search allows you to combine different formats. For example, you can search for both photographs and manuscript items.
The search results page provides customizable options for narrowing, filtering, and sorting your results.
If you want results that exclude a phrase, use a dash before the word or phrase, like this: -”Daily News”. From your results page, you can also use the limiters to select a creator or format and click “Exclude”.
Finding aids are descriptive tools that aid in the discovery of information within a collection. Generally, at CHM, there are finding aids for large collections of Archives & Manuscripts, Prints & Photographs, and Architecture material. A portion of our finding aids are available via CARLI Digital Collections and are full- text searchable, and we are actively working to make more of our collections discoverable in this way.
The Research and Access Department uses Airtable to track some of its collections where the inventories have hundreds or thousands of records, each with multiple data points. Searching massive inventories in a single spreadsheet can be time-consuming for researchers.
Airtable provides multiple options for finding information. Users can choose between basic keyword searching or layering multiple search conditions that filter the data to only display select information -- all without impacting the original data set.
Use any of the search options below or combine search features:
Find in View: Select the magnifying glass icon on the right side of the view toolbar to open a search bar (or use Ctrl+F). Type your search here and then press enter. Each instance will be highlighted in yellow in the base, and you can scroll through using the arrows in the search bar.
Airtable does not conduct "fuzzy" searches or keyword searches. For example, a search for Morton Building will bring up Morton Building Company but not Morton Salt Building.
Start broad, refine, and try different combinations of search terms.
This technique is recommended for smaller datasets, not large inventories such as the Chicago Sun-Times which will take too long to run the search and may time out.
Sort: Arrange all the data by a certain field. There is an option to add additional Sort fields. For example, you can sort all programs first by venue, then add a condition to also sort by title, then sort by year.
Filter: This technique is recommended for large datasets such as the Chicago Sun-Times. Filter out records from a view according to conditions you set to search more quickly and efficiently. You can also use Filter to search within specific fields. Combine multiple conditions to get more specific results. Select “and” from the dropdown menu between conditions for results that include both of your conditions. Select “or” from the dropdown menu for results that include either of your conditions.
Description: Select “Show records where description contains” and then enter your search terms.
Date: Select “Show records where date contains” and then enter the year or date you would like to search, such as 1985 or 1985-01 or 1985-01-26.
Results: Rows of data are numbered on the lefthand side. Next to the number, there is a diagonal arrow icon to Expand. This opens all the data for that row or entry in a single view.
Our legacy finding aids for Archives & Manuscripts, Prints & Photographs, and Architecture collections are available via HTML finding aids online. Additionally, some of our Published materials organized by collection, such as maps or ephemera, use this type of online inventory.