Noted below are the current methods by which members of our community may search our collections. However, there will be new, online methods to search our holdings available within the next year, so please keep checking back!
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.
Manuscripts
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.
Our current manuscript inventory is described in a series of Word documents on site at our facility. They are accessible either on our Reading Room computers or by scanning through a twenty-notebook printout. The manuscript holdings are cataloged in outline form according to subject matter and provenance. Below are two outlines showing the organization of those materials in two levels of detail: 1) a three-page description of the categories into which items are sorted; and 2) a thirteen-page inventory with subheadings which adds additional descriptive depth to the kinds of materials in each category. These inventories are for church materials largely before 1900, and are not a complete inventory of our personal correspondence collections, or other manuscripts.
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: Image Reproduction 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.