Find Archival Materials

About This Site

Finding aids describe collections of primary sources and other unique, original, or rare materials held at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Wilson Special Collections Library. Materials include manuscripts, letters, organizational records, photographs, audio visual recordings, oral histories, objects, zines, digital materials, and much more.

The finding aid provides information about:

• The origin of the collection
• A brief biography or historical sketch of the individual or organization
• A statement of the intellectual and physical organization of collections
• A narrative "scope and content note" describing the intellectual content of the collection as a whole and of its major subdivisions
• A detailed "contents list" providing a hierarchical listing of the collections from the series down to the file, or possibly the item, level

Some digitized archival materials may be present within finding aids, and other digital collections may be found in the Digital Collections Repository. Other special collections materials such as published books, audiovisual recordings, newspapers, government publications, maps, and more are searchable through the UNC Libraries online catalog.