Searching Our Collections
Manuscripts and Archives
The most current listing of our manuscript and archives holdings exists as a series of inventories available onsite both on our Reading Room computers and as a series of printouts. Those inventories are being transformed into online finding aids as of August 2022 with the hope of completing a Phase I migration at the end of 2023.
To search completed finding aids for our manuscript and archives collections, use the search box below.
Historical Guide to Holdings
The most complete current online listing of our manuscript holdings dates from a 1942 catalog by Dr. Adelaide Fries done with the assistance of the Work Projects Administration. Although our holdings are listed in a different catalog arrangement today, this gives you an overview of many of our older holdings.
The 1942 WPA catalog of our holdings, compiled by Adelaide Fries
Books
In the fall of 2015, the Moravian Music Foundation and the Moravian Archives combined our reference collections located in the Reading Room and classified them according to the Library of Congress cataloging system. The Moravian Music Foundation offers us and you a service, GemeinKat Catalog, which will help scholars more easily locate items within our extensive collections. Since the catalog includes the collections of the Moravian communities from the 18th through the 21st centuries, the name GemeinKat is reflective of that purpose (Gemein– from the German word for community or fellowship, and Kat for catalog).
Our thanks to our friends at the Foundation for providing us this service. These items have been cataloged in the OCLC WorldCat bibliographic database. All Archives books will be listed as holdings of the library of the Moravian Music Foundation (as you check boxes of libraries to search at the left of your query). Archives holdings have a small marker within their entry to designate their provenance within our Archives.
GemeinKat is available to the public, on the internet, at www.moravianmusic.on.worldcat.org and is a WorldCat Discovery catalog, developed by OCLC, a nonprofit organization that provides services to thousands of libraries worldwide. The Moravian Music Foundation also partnered with Backstage Library Works to prepare records based on manuscripts from the Archives of the Moravian Church in Winston-Salem, NC and Bethlehem, PA.
A future project is for the Archives to establish their own OCLC holdings that will include catalog records for both our reference collection and our rare book collection. There is not currently an available inventory of our rare book collection.
The Archives has a rare first edition copy of the Fry-Jefferson map of Virginia (photo from Library of Congress website)
Photographs and Maps
Our image collection spans the history of photography, and their content is varied. A number of our individual prints have been copied by Old Salem Museums and Gardens for their research collections and are searchable through Digital Forsyth. We have many other images awaiting digitization and identification within our materials, however, that are not found in other locations. Our most requested maps for genealogy research have been photographed in sections and are searchable in detail on our Reading Room computers. If a topic area is of visual interest to you, we encourage you to contact us to research our holdings. Inventories of our image and map collections are searchable on our in-house research computers.
For a fee we can provide copies of images or maps for use in publications, displays, websites, etc. Further information can be found here: Reprographic Services
Vertical File, Microfilm, Audio Recordings, Ephemera
Most of these holdings have been inventoried, but their catalogs are not digitally accessible at this time. Our vertical file inventory of articles and paper items is card catalog searchable in our Reading Room. Other item inventories are in Excel or Word files searchable with staff assistance on our Reading Room computers.