What American Memory resources are included in this search?

Searches that begin from the American Memory Collections: Search All Collections search page or from any Collection Finder search page include detailed bibliographic records about most items. The full text for items in some collections is also included.

Within individual collections, additional options are available for searching or for browsing lists of names, places, or subjects (as appropriate for each collection). To use these features, follow links from the collection's home page.

Not included in any American Memory search are the collection Home Pages, background texts and illustrations, and the Learning Page texts. These may be searched, along with other Library of Congress texts, through the Library of Congress Search/Browse page. The Today in History Archive can be searched separately.

Other exceptions are listed below.

1. Searches for specific format types (e.g. photographs, maps) may not always find all of the items you are looking for, or may sometimes return items in a variety of formats. This is because some multi-format collections cannot be divided according to type. For a list of the collections that are searchable by format type, click on one of the Original Formats below:

   Manuscripts | Maps | Motion Pictures | Photos & Prints | Printed Texts | Sound Recordings

2. The following collections are not searchable: The New Deal Stage: Federal Theatre Project, the Walt Whitman Notebooks.

3. The Jackie Robinson and Baseball Highlights multi-format collection includes items not part of any search.

4. The American Variety Stage multi-format collection includes ten Sound Recordings not included in any search.

5. Most Collection Previews are not searchable.

6. For most collections, bibliographic records (descriptive information about each item) will be searched. The bibliographic records for sound recordings in American Leaders Speak, Hispano Music & Culture, and Quilts and Quiltmaking are supplemented by transcriptions of the speeches and songs. In Stern Sheet Music, the bibliographic records are supplemented by transcriptions of the lyrics.

7. For American Life Histories, a textual collection without associated bibliographic records, the text itself will be searched.

8. For two other textual collections, a combination of text and bibliographic information will be searched. For The George Washington Papers, brief bibliographic records for all documents and transcriptions of most documents written by George Washington will be searched. For A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, the full text will be searched for the following seven titles: the House Journal, the Senate Journal, the Senate Executive Journal, Journals of the Continental Congress, Elliot's Debates, Farrand's Records, and Maclay's Journal. Descriptive information, supplemented with the transcription of the title's Indexes, will be searched for the Annals of Congress. To search the full text of documents in other textual collections, look for an option on individual collection search pages.

NOTE: Search engines outside of the Library of Congress may find many American Memory Home Pages and texts. However, the American Memory collection items and their descriptive records cannot usually be found by outside search engines.

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