Editor’s Note: This post was contributed by Amanda Mylin, Project Archivist at Baylor Collections of Political Materials.
The Baylor Collections of Political Materials (BCPM) is excited to introduce our newest tool for searching our collections: the Baylor Archival Repositories Database (BARD).
Our finding aids can be located by searching in BARD. Finding aids are created to describe collections and assist researchers in locating the information they need. BCPM finding aids have a biographical note describing the creator and context of the collection, scope and content notes which describe the content of the collection, and container lists that show materials in each box and folder.
There are several ways you can access BARD. First, you can visit http://www.baylor.edu/lib/bard. You can also browse to our homepage, www.baylor.edu/lib/bcpm, choose the Research Help dropdown menu, and click on Baylor Archival Repositories Database.
If you enter through this method, you have several options for finding resources. For example, if you were searching for collections that discussed religious liberty, you could enter that term in the search field.
Then click “Search.” The first result is our newly opened Thomas Chester “Chet” Edwards U.S. House of Representatives papers. To look at the finding aid, click “Display Finding Aid.”
Once you are in the finding aid, you can explore and search for the specific information you need. To see the list of materials in the collection, look through the list on the left to navigate. Our collections are organized in groups called series, which organize materials by topic and function. For instance, if you were searching for religious liberty materials, you could click on the “Religious Liberty” series to see what we have in Chet Edwards’ papers.
Clicking on the Series “Religious Liberty,” or any of its subseries, would bring you to that particular description and the box listing in the finding aid.
Once you have found what you are looking for, contact Baylor Collections of Political Materials to set up an appointment to visit! Let us know what boxes you are interested in viewing, and we will have them pulled and ready for you. Click on our name at the top of the finding aid to see our contact information.
Be sure to log out of BARD properly when you have completed your search. The “Log Out” button is always in the top right corner of BARD.
Finally, we have one last method for accessing BARD. We are excited to begin linking our Holdings directly to our finding aids located in BARD. This way, you can click the Holdings dropdown menu on our webpage and click the name of the collection you would like to see. This will bring you directly to the permanent-link finding aid in BARD.
We have linked a few of these finding aids to our webpage so far, including the newly opened Thomas Chester “Chet” Edwards U.S. House of Representatives papers! Clicking directly on his name will bring you right to the permanent-link finding aid in BARD. This finding aid is easily printable by right-clicking and choosing “Print.”
Here at BCPM we have something for everyone, and we are always happy to help assist you with your search.