MANUSCRIPTS & ARCHIVAL MATERIALS IN THE BELL COLLECTION
The Bell Library holds a variety of materials in manuscript form, dating from 400 C.E. to 1884 C.E.: charters, treaties, bills of lading, contracts, letters, memoranda, and notarial and other single documents; journals, diaries, memoires, and letterbooks; collections of family papers, business records, government records, and correspondence; memorandum and instruction books; commercial tables; travel accounts and other narratives; translations; medieval works such as a 15th-century Life of Mohammed, and a 13th-century copy of Speculum historiale.
HOW TO FIND BELL LIBRARY MANUSCRIPT AND ARCHIVAL MATERIAL
IN MNCAT, THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES' ONLINE CATALOG
From the Libraries' home page, select "Advanced Search". This
opens a new screen. At the top of the new screen—under New Search—select
"Command". On the next screen that opens, in the first large empty
box, type the following code, and then hit submit (do not enter anything into
any of the other boxes on the page:
WCL=BELL and WLT=T
(Note: The code is not case specific, but be sure to include the spaces indicated.)
This will provide you with a list of more than 400 entries that includes single documents as well as collections of more than 1000 documents. If you don't see what you're looking for, or you have difficulties with the search, please contact the staff at 612-624-1528.
INDEXES, CALLED FINDING AIDS, TO BELL ARCHIVE COLLECTIONS
Indexes or finding aids have been created for some of our large archival collections and
they are available in the Library. One of these finding aids, for the Archive of Jesuits in
Mexico and South America, is available online: http://discover.lib.umn.edu/findaid/
Finding aids for the Jesuits in China and the De Mey van Streefkirk Papers will be available online at the same
address soon. This link, which also can be found on the Archives and Special Collections home page, takes you to all
of the electronically encoded finding aids for the 11 units that comprise Archives and Special Collections
at the University of Minnesota Libraries.