Performing Archival Research

Before you visit the Archives, you'll need to know what you want to look at! There are two primary ways you can search for materials at the Pratt Institute Archives: via ArchivesSpace, which contains our finding aids for every collection, and via the Digital Collections website, which contains digitized materials from the Archives and other Library collections. 

ArchivesSpace is a database of all finding aids for the Pratt Institute Archives' collections. ArchivesSpace provides information for all collections and their contents held by the Archives. This also includes some unprocessed materials, which Archivists have not yet reviewed. 

Search Finding Aids on ArchivesSpace

The Digital Collections website, hosted by JSTOR, provides access to digitized materials from the Archives, as well as other non-archives Library and Institute collections. The Pratt Institute Libraries is regularly digitizing materials from the Archives, so be sure to check this alongside ArchivesSpace to see if materials you are interested in are already available online.

Search the Digital Collections

In short, searching within ArchivesSpace will give you a more complete understanding of the entire scope of our physical collections, since not everything has been digitized. Searching the Digital Collections site, however, gives you the ability to search for individual items that ArchivesSpace does not provide. Documents on JSTOR are also text-searchable which means you can even search for names and terms within the documents themselves.