SCPL Local History Collection

The Local History Collection is actually a group of several smaller collections arranged by type of material. For example, there are collections for photographs, postcards, maps, and newspaper articles.

Regardless of what kind of material you are looking for, a basic search will retrieve items from every collection.

How to Search

Type your keywords in the search box in the upper right corner of the window, and either hit Enter on the keyboard or click the Search (magnifying glass) button.

On the search results page you have the option to refine your search further.  Click the links in the left column (Limit Your Search) to limit by Collection, Coverage, Subject, and/or Type.  You can select multiple options; all selected limiters will appear above the results, along with a link to remove each one.

Search Tips:

There are several ways to achieve more precise results when you first enter your keywords in the search box.

• Search for a phrase by enclosing multiple words in quotation marks. ("Cooper House" will only find records that have that exact phrase. Without the quotation marks you will get every record that has either Cooper or House in it.)
• Use AND between keywords to require that all search terms are present in a record (Hecox AND Lighthouse finds only those records that contain both of those words.  Without the AND the search will return all records that contain either Hecox or Lighthouse.)
• Use - (minus sign) to indicate that a particular word or phrase should not be present in the search results (Hecox -Lighthouse finds only those records that have Hecox but not the word Lighthouse).
• Use * (asterisk) as a wildcard character (Octagon* will return results containing octagon, octagons, octagonal, etc.)