The Dance Heritage Coalition's Access Project enabled the creation of finding aids for collections at several member institutions. Also, with the assistance of the New York Public Library, many finding aids have been mounted electronically, with a cross-collection search engine.

When you first connect to the Dance Heritage Coalition's finding aids, you will see in the right frame a list of archival collections, and a search box in the bottom frame.  To keyword search, simply type words of your choice in the Search box at the bottom of the screen.  For other options, click on one of the gray buttons above the search box.

Click on the example to see it in a new window.
Close the new window to return to this page of Choreographing Your Search.

The Help button above the search window describes the content of the other gray buttons, and gives hints on search phrases, on the combining search terms with Boolean operators "and", "or," "not," parenthesis, wild cards and truncation chararacters.   Proximity searching, using "after," "before," "of," "within word," or "within x words" and stopwords (such as "the," "a," "an," etc.) are also discussed.

To view the finding aids currently available online, Search the Dance Heritage Coalition finding aids. A new browser window will open. When you have finished searching the finding aids, close the newly opened browser window, rather than using your internet browser's BACK button, to return to this page of Choreographing Your Search.

Type Limon in the search window box.




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Note that the search engine is not case sensitive--if you type Limon (capitalized) or limon (uncapitalized), the result will be the same.  Click on the Search Collection box, and you will see the following results.




Click on the example to see it in a new window.
Close the new window to return to this page of Choreographing Your Search.

You can see that Limon was found 54 times in the José Limón photographs collection, 19 times in the John Lindquist collection, etc.