Archival Research

Amherst College Digital Collections contains all of the Amherst College course catalogs, all of the Olios, selections of Native American Literature, the Emily Dickinson Collection, the Jeffrey Amherst Collection, the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Papers, and many others.

Start at acdc.amherst.edu and use the basic search box in the upper right corner of every page.

Another way to search is in Discover. Enter your search terms and set the “Databases” filter to “Amherst College Digital Collections” (you may need to hit “Show More”). Then, click the link to view the item. 

Use ACDC's Advanced search to search within the full text of books and documents, as well as many other criteria.  

About full-text searching

• You can't currently search the text of handwritten items, as they do not have transcripts (yet). 
• Most full-text results of books and other printed material are auto-generated using optical character recognition (OCR). Due to the scale of the material, we have not corrected these full-text results, and they may contain errors that could impact your search results.
   

Use the filters on the left to refine your search results by date range, archival collection, contributor(s), place of creation or publication, genre, subject, copyright status, and more.

For items with full text available (generally books and other printed material), use the Search inside box within the item viewer to search within the item’s text. 

When viewing an item, look for the Download Object button beneath the viewer. File types available are jpg and pdf. Images can currently only be downloaded one page at a time, but we plan to add the option to download the entire item in one PDF soon. 

Please email libdig@amherst.edu with a link to the item if you need different versions of files or run into any issues with downloads.