WorldCat is an huge online catalog of materials (books, periodicals, films, recordings, manuscripts, etc.) from libraries and other repositories across the world, with a heavy emphasis on North America.
WorldCat allows for searching of the NUCMC records (1986- ) and also contains catalog records for non-NUCMC archival and manuscript material contributed by member libraries.
Manuscripts and archival collections may appear in three different forms in WorldCat:
The Library of Congress provides a gateway for searching OCLC WorldCat (Manuscript materials) -- nearly 1.5 million catalog records describing archival and manuscript collections and individual manuscripts in public, college and university, and special libraries located throughout North America and around the world. Access to this gateway is made available courtesy of OCLC, Inc.
To use the NUCMC, please visit: http://www.loc.gov/coll/nucmc/index.html
Starting in 1959, archival repositories sent catalog records of their collections to the National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections at the Library of Congress. These were published in a series of volumes until 1993. From 1986 on, NUCMC also sent records to the WorldCat database.
WorldCat can be accessed at:
Creating an account within WorldCat will be beneficial and helpful to searching.
A keyword search in WorldCat on a person's name will find both collections of your subject's own papers (which may well exist in several repositories) and letters written by your subject and occurring in their recipients' papers. You can also search for categories of persons by using subject terms: physics, physicists, women authors. Finding aids are often linked from the WorldCat record.
You can also limit a search geographically. Thus, search as Subject keywords:
Birmingham and (Alabama or Ala). The full state name and the abbreviation are both used in different Subject terms. A list of the proper abbreviations is available.
Limit by repository state using Keyword: cp: Massachusetts
Remove punctuation and other symbols (colons, parentheses) from search terms.
To search for manuscripts and archival collections in WorldCat, go to Advanced Search. Put your relevant search terms in a search box. Then you have two options for limiting to archival and manuscript material (you must do both searches in order to cover all relevant materials, though the results will overlap to some extent).
First, search by selecting "Archival Material" in the "Format" box.
Second, search by selecting "Manuscript" in the "Format" box.
It is important to do both in order to cover all relevant materials, though the results will overlap to some extent. Limiting by format usually necessary because WorldCat contains millions of records for books and other media which normally overwhelm records.
Items tagged as Archival Material yields “mixed materials," that is, typical sets of personal papers and organizational records, together with many scrapbooks. Excluded are individual manuscripts such as manuscripts of literary works, diaries, and other unitary items, usually tagged as manuscripts (which will be included in "Manuscript"). Much manuscript material is tagged as both Manuscript and Archival Material, but a good deal is only tagged as Archival Material or as Manuscript. Searching Archival Materials and Manuscript simultaneously will exclude much material, thus the need to perform two searches.
These directions for searching WorldCat were mostly taken from the Harvard guide "Finding Manuscripts and Archival Collections" available here: https://guides.library.harvard.edu/archives/us