The Digital Collections search gateway is the central hub for accessing all the digital collections at the University of Illinois Library. The portal centralizes the unique digital collections services and offers users the opportunity to search across those collections at a global level. The different digital collections services include:

• Digital Special Collections - Digitized manuscripts, photographs, maps, and other special collections research materials, as well as personal and organizational digital archives.
• Scholarship - Research and scholarship of faculty, staff, and students in IDEALS, the Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship.
• Digitized Books - Books from the library's holdings now available online.
• Research Data - Publicly accessible research data from faculty, staff, and graduate students in the Illinois Data Bank.
• Digitized Newspapers - Newspapers and journals with an Illinois focus in the Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections.

This guide focuses on the Digital Special Collections, but depending on how you use the search platform you may receive results from the other services as well.

The primary Digital Collections platform offers various ways to search and filter results. To search across all of the services and collections in the library, use the global search field highlighted in orange shown below. The global search will deliver results from the Digital Special Collections, IDEALS, Digitized Books, Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection, and Research Data Service. This is a broad search and will deliver many results. Users may want to visit the Filtering Results section of this guide to learn how to get more specific results.

To browse collections or items across all of the services and collections in the library, use the global browse option and select Collections or Items from the grey drop down menu as highlighted with the orange box in the screenshot below. Similar to the global search, this global browse will deliver results from the Digital Special Collections, IDEALS, Digitized Books, Illinois Digital Newspaper Collection, and Research Data Service. 

After clicking to browse either items or collections, to limit the results to Digital Special Collections, use the "Service" facet on the upper left hand side of the page and check the "Digital Special Collections" option. From here you can either use the "filter" box to limit by keyword, or use additional facets to narrow your results. Visit the Understanding and Using Facets pages to learn more about facets.

Users can also go directly to the Digital Special Collections to browse the collections by clicking the Digital Special Collections box (outlined in orange in the screenshot below). This will provide for browsing digital content primarily from the Rare Book & Manuscript Library, the Map Library, Illinois History and Lincoln Collections, and the University Archives.