Help FAQ - Exploring

Whereas Searching leads you to specific items, Exploring lets you browse all items in an area of the Portal to get a broad overview of the contents similar to browsing shelves in a library. You can explore by subject area, geographic location, date range, item type, or title. You can also explore items from a specific partner or items in a particular collection.

Yes, some Explore groupings allow you to search—but only after you've made an initial selection within the grouping. Choose Explore and then select titles, locations, resource types, or dates. When the selected grouping opens, choose from the list that is presented. When the next screen opens you will see a search box at the top of the results list. You can also use the categories shown on the left-hand side of the screen to further refine your results. For more information, please see our Guides.

The time periods highlight significant themes in Texas history as well as chronological periods. This allows you to target your exploration to the theme that is most interesting to you. Our Explore Dates page also allows you to browse by decade, browse by year, specify a range of dates, or see this day in history.

Curated titles are titles of publications such as newspapers, journals, magazines, or newsletters that we have identified as serials and have entries in our "Titles" database. The complete list of curated titles is available via the Explore interface. From this list, you can access title records that include information such as place of publication, holdings, succeeding and preceding titles (when available on our site), and partner information for each particular title.