The University of West Florida has launched a portal for finding pointers to holdings on West Florida history. The collections contains information on more than 700 collections of family papers, business records, maps, photographs, and so on. It’s still under development but you can check it out at http://fusionmx.lib.uwf.edu/archon/ .

You can browse several different ways (collection title, subject, digital library, etc.) but you can also search by keyword and choose whether or not to include box lists in your search (box lists; the specifics of what’s in each collection, it’ll get you a lot more results.) Searching for Hurricane found over 100 results when including box lists (um, how’d that paper doll box get in there?) But, while the collections are thoroughly described, don’t expect to see content here. It’s just a list of what’s available, collection overviews, and access information.

There’s a lot more to be done here (as you can tell when you visit the digital archive page) but there’s enough of a start that you’ll find plenty to browse.