Search Tips

Searching for items

To begin your search, type what you are looking for into the search box on the home page or at the bottom of any other page and then click the magnifying glass icon next to the box or click the return/enter key.

How to refine your search

The Atla Digital Library search results are sorted by relevance. You can further refine your search by any of the faceted metadata on the left side of the search results screen. This includes Creator, Date, Contributing Institution, Subject, Place, Contributor, Collection, Format (Original), Language, Publisher, Time Period, Format (Digital), and Type. Note that not all works use all of the facets.

  • You can search for an exact phrase by putting it inside quotation marks.
    “Church of Ireland” will return results with the exact phrase "Church of Ireland"
  • You can use boolean search operators AND, OR, NOT, -, and +
    Texas AND "Fort Worth" will only return results that have both Texas AND Fort Worth in the metadata
    Texas OR "Fort Worth" will return results that have either Texas OR Fort Worth in the metadata
    Texas NOT "Fort Worth" will return results that have Texas but do not have Fort Worth in the metadata
    Texas +"Fort Worth" will return results that must have Fort Worth but may or may not have Texas (or any other search terms)
    Texas -"Fort Worth" will return results that must not have Fort Worth but will have Texas (or at least one other of your search terms)
    NOTE: You only need to use quotes around a multi word search term
  • You can use the wildcard operator *
    An asterisk can be used to specify any number of characters.
    Mission* would get you results that include Mission, Missions, Missionary, or Missionaries

Display #

You can view 10, 20, 50, or 100 items per page by choosing from the drop down menu at the top right of the search results

Sort order

Atla Digital Library sorts search results by relevance to your search. You can use the dropdown menu to change this to A-Z or Z-A sort order.

Browse for items

  • Browse by Collection
    From the home page itself and from the navigation menu under “Explore”, you can choose to browse all collections by name. This browse page includes faceted metadata for the collections themselves not for the items in those collections.
  • Browse by Contributing Institution
    From the home page itself and from the navigation menu under “Explore”, you can choose to browse by “Contributing Institution” name. This is a list of all institutions that have collections in the digital library and each link will take you to all of the collections and works contributed by the institution you chose.
  • Browse All Items
    From the home page under the search bar, you can choose “Browse all items” to be taken to a search page that lets you refine and browse by faceted metadata all items in the digital library.

To find out more about items in the Atla Digital Library

To obtain further information about any item presented in the Digital Library contact the participating institution who contributed the item to the Digital Library. The works in the Digital Library include a link back to the contributors digital repository where you can find more information. Atla does not host or otherwise possess original items or their digital reproductions and cannot provide this information.


For further help please contact us