Summer Boost : How to Find Resources in the Digital Repository Service

The DRS is the Northeastern University Library’s system for storing collections of digitized and born-digital material. These digital collections may include photographs, videos, documents, audio recordings, and data. Here are a few digital collections you might consider using in your research:

• Researching art or architecture? The CAMD Slide Library includes more than 32,000 digital representations of pieces from around the world. Try searching for your favorite artist or city.
• Need musical or journalistic inspiration? Listen to hundreds of interviews conducted by Larry Katz of the Boston Herald with performing artists from 1980 to 2007. Try searching for Morphine, Nina Simone, or Harry Belafonte.
• Looking into the history of Boston? The Boston Globe photograph collection contains photographs taken around the city of Boston between 1900 and 1990 (approximately). Consider visiting the University Archives and Special Collections to browse the one million physical photographs in the collection.
• Looking for research ideas? Explore the more than 6,000 theses and dissertations produced by Northeastern’s masters and Ph.D. students since 2008.

Where to search

There are two search boxes for you to use:

• the main search box at the top right of the page
• the collection search box under a collection or community title

The main search box searches across all collections in the DRS. A collection search box searches only the contents of that collection, including the contents of sub-collections.

Limiting your search

Use the "Limit your search" option to narrow your search results. You can find options to reduce your results to the left of the search results in List View or at the top of your results in Grid View.

You can use these options to narrow your search to a type of material, like images or video, or to a particular year. Depending on your search, you may see options to limit your results by:

• Creator name
• Year
• Department (only for theses and dissertations)
• College (only for theses and dissertations)
• Degree Level (only for theses and dissertations)
• Subject (only for library-cataloged materials)
• Type (e.g., community, collection, user, image, video, or text)

Search operators

Some standard search techniques will work when searching the DRS:

• Use quotation marks around a phrase to return results with that exact phrase. For example, a search for social justice will return results that contain the word social and the word justice anywhere in the document. A search for “social justice”, with the words enclosed in quotation marks, will return results containing that exact phrase.
• Truncation allows you to broaden your search by returning words that share a common root. The DRS truncation symbol is an asterisk (*). Adding this asterisk to a root word will return results with different endings. For example, a search for psych* will return results for psychology, psychologist, psychiatry, psychotherapy, etc.
• By using wildcards, you can search for different variations of a word in a single search. A search for ‘organization’ will not include items that use the variation ‘organisation’. By inserting a question mark (?) in the space of the variant letter, ‘organi?ation,’ the system will search for both spelling options.

Other digital collections

The Digital Repository Service is just one of many systems that provide access to digital collections. To expand your search beyond Northeastern’s collections, consider exploring the Digital Public Library of America, Digital Commonwealth, which is the Massachusetts hub of the DPLA, or the contributing hub for your home state.

You may use most, if not all, of the resources you find in the DRS in your course work under the fair use doctrine but be sure to check copyright or licensing terms before using them outside the classroom.

Remember, if you have any questions: ask a librarian