How to View/Request Material

To view or request materials from the Emerson College Archives and Special Collections, please email: archives@emerson.edu.

How to Search

Enter search terms in the search box to do a basic search. To limit your search to a specific span of time, enter the year span in the FROM and TO fields.

For an advanced search, click the plus (+) symbol to include additional terms and use search operators and wildcards to help you create complex searches, refine your results, include variations of search terms, and also exclude non-relevant results. You can use one or more at the same time. Below is a list of operators and wildcards:

• And: Allows you to combine multiple search terms, to retrieve results that have all the terms (i.e. emerson AND boylston will only retrieve results that have both emerson and boylston).
• Or: Allows you to search for either one term or another (i.e. tremont Or boylston will only retrieve results that have either tremont or boylston).
• Not: Allows you to search for one term and not another (i.e. boylston NOT yearbook will only retrieve results that have the term boylston and exclude any that have the term yearbook). This is extremely helpful if you realize you need to refine your search to exclude some results.
• Quotes (""): Allows you to search for an exact phrase (i.e. "120 Boylston" will retrieve results that have 120 Boylston).
• Asterisk (*): Allows you to search for variations of term (i.e. alumn* will retrieve results that include alumni, alumna, or alumnus).
• Question mark (?): Allows you to search for spelling/number variations (i.e. camer?n will retrieve results for cameron or cameran or camerin).
• Tilde (~): Allows you to do proximity searches, you can search for a term a specific distance from another term (i.e. "fred life"~10 will retrieve results that have fred and life within 10 spaces of each other). You can also use the tilde to do fuzzy searches to retrieve similar terms (i.e. dorm~ will retrieve results for dorm or dormitory).