Finding Manuscript Resources In
The Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections
The Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections (LLMVC) is an integrated research center, which means it contains all formats of materials, dedicated to recording the history and culture of the Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley (the area from Memphis to New Orleans). Formats include books, serials and journals, photographs, state documents, microfilm of existing files of most LA newspapers, audio and visual materials, pamphlets and maps. In addition to these published works, the collections include unpublished sources in the form of archive and manuscript collections totaling more than 5000 discrete collections and including over 10 million items.
LLMVC HOLDINGS
- Subject Guides
Subject guides prepared by Special Collections staff identifying some of the strengths of the collection and individual collections about those topics. To find out more information about the collections referenced, check the online catalog and the manuscript card catalog in the reading room of Hill Memorial Library. The notation “Complete Finding Aid Available” indicates an inventory of the collection is available online as well. Inventories are more specific, written descriptions, for the collections. Those inventories on the web and the subject guides, are keyword searchable at http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/AT-specialsearch.html
- Online catalog
Manuscript collections are cataloged in the online catalog, along with books, serials, audio visual materials, and the other holdings of the LSU Libraries. To retrieve records for manuscript collections most effectively, choose to do an Advanced Search, which gives you the option to search by author, title, subject, and keyword. These can be combined for an even narrower search by using AND, OR, NOT, which is called Boolean searching. Keyword searches are very helpful for conducting a broad search to locate manuscript items by topic. To make a any search retrieve only records for manuscript collections, choose the following options on the Advanced Search form,: “Hill Memorial Library,” as the library, “Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collections as the location, and “Manuscript format” as the catalog format.
| SAMPLE SEARCHES |
Title: |
Joseph D. Shields papers (be sure “match on” is set to keywords or left to right) |
Author: |
Chol Emmanuel (name in reverse order; no comma needed) |
Subject: |
Plantations Louisiana (must be a Library of Congress subject heading; seen as Plantations—Louisiana in the record, but the search is entered without the dashes) |
Keyword: | ku klux klan and Louisiana (finds all records in which “ku klux klan” and
“Louisiana” both appear) The same results can be had by filling in one box with “opera” and the other with “Louisiana” and by choosing “words and phrases” on each pull-down menu.
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- It is important to note that not all manuscript collections in the LLMVC have been cataloged or entered in the online catalog, so it is also necessary to check the MANUSCRIPT CARD CATALOG, which is only available in the reading room of Hill Memorial Library
- Inventories
The above points of access enable you to identify a potentially relevant collection. Inventories of the collections, which are more detailed descriptions of a collection's contents, are also available. Besides providing additional description, these assist you in determining which boxes of a particular collection you would like to look at. Paper copies are filed alphabetically by the name of the collection in the reading room, and approximately 150 are available on our website at http://www.lib.lsu.edu/special/findaid/index.html. See “Tips on Using Manuscript Inventories” for more information about inventories. The inventories and the subject guides on the web site can be searched by choosing “Search” in the box on the left side of the Special Collections website.

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