The above search box can be used to search all of the UW's Digital Special Collections. Below, you will find a number of searching tips from our staff which may help you find what you're looking for more easily.
To begin, here are a few basic tips about using the Advanced Search box you see above. We'll use the words mountaineers players as an example.
The wildcard character is the asterisk * -- for example,if you wanted to search for the phrases mountaineers plays and mountaineers players, a search for mountaineers play* would yield both results. The asterisk only works when it is placed at the end of a word.
Special Collections has an Oral Histories Collection and a Moving Image Collection. If you would like to limit your search to audio files, you can use the search term "oral history" in your search. If you would like to limit your search to film you may use the term "Movingimage" in your search.
To find images with specific content, try to envision what types of things may be present in the image. For example, if you're looking for an image of a climber, but the results from searches for climber, climbing, etc., aren't getting you what you want, try words like glacier, crevasse, mountains, summit, etc.
Tip: Searching the Mountaineers Photograph Collection
If you're looking for images specifically from The Mountaineers trips search the Mountaineers Photograph Album Collection.
Once you have entered your search terms and received results, some results will appear to be cover pages, captions or single photos from an album. If you click on each thumbnail, the photograph within that album that matches your search will be shown. Be aware that there may be more than one image from an album that matches your search. When you are viewing an image, the navigation bar to the left of the image will show you a list of all the pages in the album. The pages which have photographs that match your search will be bracketed in red. Click on each of these to view the photograph from that page.
The document description, which is a description of the album, appears below each photograph. To see a description of the photograph itself, click on the drop down menu labeled View, located at the top left of the page, and choose page description. To return to the photograph, click on the red bracketed page number on the list.
Searching for additional materials
The U.W.'s Digital Collections contain many other materials on a variety of topics related to mountains and mountaineering. To search effectively for them, it's best to use the vocabulary terms we use to classify these materials such as: newsletters, bulletin, clipping, pamphlet, brochure, flier, leaflet, handbook, booklet, correspondence.
