TOUR

Archives of Sexuality & Gender:

LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940

This tutorial was created by Zackary Chance Medlin for his 17:610:530:90 class at Rutgers University in the Fall of 2017

Before we get started, I wanted to draw your attention to the 'Quick Escape' buttons. These can be clicked on at any time, if you feel browsing this tutorial has become unsafe. Clicking on these will immediately take you away from this tutorial.

Howdy, my name is Chance Medlin, I use he/him/his pronouns and I work at Texas A&M University Libraries! I am also an Aggie Ally. If you ever need someone to talk to or have questions, I would be more than happy to listen and help!

In this tutorial, I am going to show you around a great resource called Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940. This database is an amazing resource where you can find primary documents and learn more about LGBTQ history and culture.

You can scroll down the page to learn more!

If you have questions or need additional help, please contact me!

In this tutorial, I will be covering:

  • How to find the Archives
  • What's inside the Archives
  • How to Search the Archives
  • What you can do with items you find
  • Interesting Features
  • How to Get More Help

Let's start by talking about how you can get to the Archives of Sexuality & Gender: LGBTQ History and Culture since 1940.

From the library homepage, library.tamu.edu, click on the 'Databases' button.



Type "Archives of Sexuality & Gender" into the databases search box and click the 'Search' button.



You can click on the title of the database to enter.

Note: If you are off campus, you may be asked to login with your NetID and Password.



Now that we are here, let's explore what is inside the Archives!

You can click on the 'About' tab or "See What's Inside" to read an overview of the Archives!



The Archives include materials from hundreds of organizations both large and small.

You can explore the 20 collections to learn more about the history of LGBT+ life.

Some of the types of documents included are:

  • Meeting, committee, and conference minutes
  • Press releases, articles, fliers, brochures, and presentations
  • Newspapers, newsletters, and magazines
  • Studies and reports by US government agencies and nongovernmental organizations
  • Medical research records and reports
  • Private correspondence
  • Surveys
  • Photographs

By clicking on the "Explore Collections" tab, you can explore the archives by diving deeper into each collection.

You can apply limits even before you begin your search that include:

  • Content type
  • Document type
  • Language
  • Source Library

For instance, If you are only looking for a map, or perhaps just want to look through images, you can limit your search to the collections that include that material.

Searching the Archives

By clicking on "Advanced Search", you are able to control your searching more.

There is also an option to "Allow variations" which includes different spellings of your search terms.

You can apply limits even before you begin your search.

You can also click on the drop down after the "Search for" box to determine where you want the database to search the keywords you type into that particular box.

After clicking search, you will see the results screen.

The results will be organized in chunks based on content type.

You can narrow your results by using the limits on the left side of the screen.

There are 'Subjects' that put your results in new categories. These may give you other search keywords to try.

Under each thumbnail, there are buttons you can click on to enlarge the thumbnail and flip through the pages or images of the item.

What you can do with items you find

If you click on an item that you want to explore further, you will see that the Archives will show you pages that are relevant to the words you searched. So you can click on specific pages to see where your search terms are. They will be highlighted in green. You can also use the 'Search Within' feature to search the document with new keywords.

There is also a nice expandable Table of Contents to explore the item.

There are many great options to make sure you can keep any great finds:

Interesting Features

Back on the search results screen, there are two really neat features of the Archives that I want to show you. They may help you think about your searches.

Term Clusters and Term Frequency




Term Clusters, allow you to take a deep dive into search terms and their relationships with other terms. This feature is extremely interactive. If you click on a section, you can see Results of that search term (from the collection) on the right side of the screen.




Term Frequency, allows you to look at what is in the collection over time based on a search term.

Think about how certain terms may have been used differently over time. Does this change how you search?


If you create an account, you can sign into it and have access to additional features including:

  • saving your searches, which can be cleared if need be
  • adding private tags to items to help you organize them in your own way.

Need more help ? I am here for you!

  • Need more help?
  • Not finding what you are looking for?
  • Do the Archives not have what you are looking for?
  • Want someone to talk to?

Feel free to contact me:

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