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Library of Congress Research Guides

Holocaust Studies: Manuscript Resources at the Library of Congress

General Search Tips

When searching in the Library of Congress Online Catalog for materials related to the Holocaust in the Library of Congress catalog and in other repositories, there are several strategies to keep in mind.

  • When searching for Holocaust-related material in relation to specific locations, remember that country and city names have changed over the years and may be written in respect to the occupying power at the time. For example, the German names "Auschwitz" instead of "Oświęcim ," or "Danzig" instead of "Gdańsk," Poland.
  • Try specific persons' names, who were involved in War Crimes trials, or visited the respective countries as journalists or foreign ambassadors, such as "Arendt" or "Pulitzer".Consider variations in international spellings if having trouble retrieving results. Similarly, knowing other names of prominent persons and companies from the period of your research may help you find relevant collections.
  • Search "Nazi" or "War Crimes" as a SUBJECT in the advanced search option.
  • Search our online finding aids for related names and locations.

Library of Congress Romanization

The Library of Congress collects materials in many languages and scripts. Since the 1980's, LC has distributed catalog records that include non-Latin script data in bibliographic records and in references in authority records. Starting with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, LC now includes support for many of the languages that use the Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew, and Perso-Arabic scripts. Romanization is also for systems that cannot use non-Latin forms, have support for only some scripts, or require romanized fields for indexing and sorting purposes.

When searching for related material in the Library of Congress online catalog, it may be helpful to utilize the Library of Congress romanization tables, available at the link below:

Using Library of Congress Subject Headings

Authorized subject headings can be useful when searching in online catalogs. Subject headings include standardized topics, names, places, titles, and forms/genres of material. Subject headings like those listed below can help researchers get started and to perform searches in the Library' of Congress Online Catalog.

Searching the Library's Online Catalog for Manuscripts

When searching in the Library of Congress Online Catalog, you can confine your search results to materials held by the Manuscript Division using "advanced search" (see screenshot below).

Screen shot of Library of Congress catalog page showing how you can limit the location to the Manuscript Division
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