Searching the Universal Yiddish Library (UYL)

The Universal Yiddish Library includes collections of Yiddish literature from four partner institutions: the Yiddish Book Center the New York Public Library (NYPL), the National Library of Israel (NLI) and the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research.

You can search the full-text of many digitized books, which have been processed with Optical Character Recognition (OCR). In many cases, you can view the digital scan of the full-text of the book as you search the text. Other books are not viewable directly on the Universal Yiddish Library site, but can be viewed in the owning institution’s digital repository. Some books are still under copyright, so while we can’t show you the full-text of the book, you can search the full-text and see a snippet of the text where your search term appears. More than half of the books in this catalog are not yet scanned, so you can search the library records for these books, and see which institutions own copies

The search bar

Your search starts with the search bar that consists of two parts: a search field dropdown and an input box for your search term.

The search term input box

You may input search terms in both Latin and Yiddish/Hebrew characters, and we provide you with an onscreen Yiddish keyboard in case you need one. You can include or omit ligature marks and diacritics for any search. The UYL architecture will match any spellings, in Yiddish and Hebrew as well as Latin and other characters, against our database records. Please note that the full-text search only includes Yiddish words; our OCR engine does not correctly transcribe words in any languages other than Yiddish.

UYL will by default include vaguely similar matches in your search results. Enclose your search terms in double quotation marks ("") for a more exact/strict phrase match.

You can narrow your results set using the filters along the side of the screen.

Search fields dropdown

By default your search term will be matched against a variety of metadata fields including book titles and their authors as well as the full text if the book has been processed with OCR.

You may limit your search with the search fields dropdown, which enables you to specify just titles and authors or to search "Full-text only" option, which searches the contents of the scanned books.

Search results

Once you have clicked the search search button, your query returns all relevant matches, sorted by an automatically determined proximity score.

You can change how results are sorted, either ascending or descending, by title (alphabetically) or date of publication, if known.

You can load the next set of results at the bottom of the page.

Search filters

You can narrow your search using various filters.

You can expand each of these categories and limit your search results within a specific subset by activating a set of filters. Please note that filters will update to match your subset; deactivating filters will return your subset to its previous state.

Also note we typically show you only the filters with most hits, but more filters may be available. Click the 'View more' button to open a drawer that provides you access to all relevant filters in this category.

A similar drawer will open with a filter where you can define a date range, either with the slider or entering a start and end year in the boxes below.

Each bar represents a decade and hovering over each bar will show you how many hits relate to that particular decade.

Any filters you activate are added to the top of the search results page. You can click on them to remove them, which will restore the previous state.

Viewing a search result

For books that are unscanned or don’t display images (usually due to copyright restrictions) you will see the library catalog metadata for the book.

Full-text view

For scanned books where images are displayed, you will see the book open in our image viewer. You can search the full-text while looking at the scan of the book. The full-text viewer can also display three different versions of the OCR text – the original text as transcribed, YIVO normalized, and a Romanized version.

Further down the page you will find other relevant metadata pertaining to this title as well as a some useful links on the right-hand side, including the subjects related to the work, institutions with a copy of the work and ways to link or cite this record in other places.