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1. Introducing the LCMSDS archives

The LCMSDS archives contains a number of collections acquired by the centre of primary source documents detailing the military and social history of Canada, the United States, Great Britain as well as a number of other countries. Descriptions of our collections can be found by visiting the "Our Collections" portion of the archives site.

2. Searching the archives with ROVER

You can use ROVER, our archival search engine, to search our holdings by keyword. This means that you may search by phrase, date, subject, creator, conflict or any other word that relates to your subject. You can search individual collections or the entire holdings of the archives by clicking on the "Rover Search" button on the left.

3. Understanding how ROVER works and the results you find

ROVER searches records from either one collection or all collections. The records that are retrieved point to either a single document or, more commonly, a collection of documents on a particular subject. For example, if you search the Shephard archive for "veritable," four records are retrieved. One of the four records points a specific 3 page document in file 00003 called "Casualties Among Tank Crews in 11th Armoured Division in Operation Veritable." We could retrieve this document using the Record Group Number (in this case "1") and the file number (in this case "00003"). More commonly, however, as in another result in the "veritable" search, we would find a record that points to a collection of documents on a particular subject, in this case "Crew casualties and tank damage." When retrieving this file in our archives we would find a number of documents in a single folder all related to "Crew casualties and tank damage."

4. Search for Digital Documents

Some of our holdings will, in the coming months, be digitized. This means that a digital copy in PDF form of specific documents will be available online. In most cases, whole files will not be digitized, only those documents from a file that we think will be of interest to the most people. To search for digital documents include the word "digital" in your search and make sure that "match all words" is checked off

5. Ordering documents/viewing the collection

You can order documents for a small fee or visit our collection in person. Please visit the FAQ page for more information.