Primary Sources for Librarians

http://staff.lib.muohio.edu/~presnejl/find.prim.html

 

Definitions and Characteristics

Primary Sources are items that are directly associated with their producer or user and the time period in which they were created, or as memiors or recollections years after the event. Examples include diaries, newspaper articles, government documents, clothing, photographs, oral interviews, business records, and news broadcasts.

Secondary Sources are analyses and interpretations of primary sources and other sources, which can include other secondary sources such as books as well as tertiary sources such as encyclopedia articles and full-length histories.

 

 

Types of Primary Sources

Public Records
 Governments since biblical times have been in the business of keeping a myriad of records in order to define their populations, create policies and procedures, and otherwise maintain civil order. Census Records, court records, and tax records are all examples of public records.
Official Records
 To operate, governments have laws and guidelines, the documentation of which become valuable official records that provide a wealth of information. Examples of these kinds of records include laws, civil codes, legislative hearings, statistics, treaties, and military records.
Personal Documents
 Individuals generate amazing amounts of documentation that can teach us a great deal about their lives and societies. Diaries, letters, email correspondence, oral histories, financial records, household accounts, and financial statements are all incredibly rich research sources.
Artifacts
 There is a physical side to human existence and much can be learned about thought and culture by studying the things that humans use, consume, and produce. Examples include furniture, paintings, tools, machines, clothing, firearms, music, and art.
Business and Organizational Documents
 Corporations and other organizations produce materials that document their activities, as well as the role and identity of their workers, members, constituents, and clients. Shipping manifests, inventories, financial records, meeting minutes, and production schedules can all be helpful research tools.
Images
 Photographs and video images are valuable records of events as they occurred, although the viewpoint of the person behind the camera needs to be taken into careful consideration.
Architecture
 There is a great deal to be learned from the style of buildings as well as a city’s physical layout. Documents that provide this kind of information include photographs, city plans, blueprints, house drawings, house plans, and maps.
Media and other public/audiovisual communication
 News and its path of communication have certainly changed over time, but its significance as a primary source has not. Individuals’ constant need and desire to “know,” coupled with the need of governments and commercial interests to disseminate information has produced vast amounts of fertile material to study including newspapers, magazines, learned societies’ publications, television news broadcasts, broadsides, and radio broadcasts.
Literary texts
 The text of a novel is also a primary source. Written in a specific time and place, it often reflects the culture and thought or the antithesis of the culture and thought of that era, even if the novel is set in another time period. Historians sometimes combine popular novels with some of the other primary source material listed above in their research

 

Sites with Examples and Tutorials

Using Primary Sources on the Web (RUSA) http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/History/RUSA/
Primary Sources: Lesson Plans American Memory http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/lessons/psources/pshome.html
Yale University Primary Sources http://www.library.yale.edu/ref/err/primsrcs.htm
History Matters: Making Sense of Evidence http://historymatters.gmu.edu/browse/makesense/
How to Read a Primary Source (from Reading, Writing, and Researching for History by Patrick Rael at Bowdoin College) http://academic.bowdoin.edu/WritingGuides/reading/html/index.shtml

 

Finding Primary Sources

Questions to ask about primary sources

1. What types of primary materials might have been produced? Remember to think both about printed materials such as documents as well as physical representations of culture such as art work and architecture.
2. Who would have produced these primary sources?
3. Who would have used and or critiqued these primary sources?
4. When would these primary sources have been produced?
5. Would these primary sources have been published, unpublished, or represented in another form (an audiotape of an interview, for instance)?

 

 

Collections of Internet Documents

 

Published Sources for Mass Consumption

Books

Journals and Magazines

Magazines are good at looking at the popular opinion of the time. Advertisements as well as articles can help explain fashion, trends in thought, reading tastes (serialized fiction), human interest and some in depth reporting (for instance issues around the civil war or popular science, even true crime). Journals will trace changes in intellectual thought. Journals and the footnote, as we know it, are relatively new developments. Journals began as a means for a group of primarily scientists/philosophers (initially a fine line) to talk to one another about ideas. Historians can use journals to trace the development of ideas (insanity for instance) between scientific and popular perceptions.

Major Indexes/Sources

Newspapers, Opinion and News magazines

Using News. Newspapers provide one type of eyewitness account of an event. They also are full of editorials and letters to the editor which will gauge LOCAL public opinion. However, all of these sources have a political affiliation. Newspapers were and are today affiliated with a political party. Even the major opinion magazines, while not directly affiliation with a party are usually openly conservative or liberal, generally never moderate. Newspapers also contain other fascinating data about the town which will provide a glimpse into life at that time. Arrival of ships and a list of goods would be posted. Classifieds told what people consumed and the cost of goods -- what was for sale. Court announcements. Society news (for larger areas). If you want to trace American political opinion through some of its more prominent, long-lived political magazines, see the following table. (Political Magazines in the United States)

Finding Newspapers. Historically newspapers came and went quickly early in a town's existence and were never considered prized possessions like a book and thus were never saved. What this means is that even if we know a newspaper was in existence in a particular place, a copy may not exist. In the 1970's and 1980's the United States did a massive program to identify all of the newspapers that ever existed and microfilm whatever was left. Most state libraries or other state designated institutions (usually the major university) have copies of the film and will loan it. The problem is identifying the newspaper. Titles are often oblique -- there are oodles of "Republicans" out there. Sometimes the name of the city is not always in the title. Finding International Newspapers is a bit harder. English newspapers seem well represented in Worldcat.

Catalog Search Tips

Indexes

Unpublished Sources and Manuscripts (including Oral Histories)

Using a Catalog

Search for the person, entity, organization as an author

Using an Index

Other Ways to locate manuscript and primary source materials

Other Types of Primary Sources

Documents of Official Bodies, Organizations, and Corporations

Using a Catalog

Indexes

Government Documents

  • Monthly Catalog of United States Government Publications. 1895- present.
    Government Documents Catalog Service http://www.auto-graphics.com/cgipac/mmx/muno
    Provides bibliographic citations to government documents produced by U. S. government agencies (ie. not Congress, the President or the Judiciary)
  • CIS U. S. Serial Set Index 1817 – 1969.
    Documents and Law
    Serial Set includes selected House and Senate reports and documents, including documents submitted by government agencies to Congress. Indexes are divided into parts, by years. Parts of this index and or the material included in the serial set, may be included in other indexes available at your library.
  • Lexis-Nexis Congressional.
    http://web.lexis-nexis.com/congcom.
    Fee based database, provided by Lexis Nexis which includes Congressional Hearings, public laws and other Congressional related publications, some back to 1789.
  • BOPCRIS: British Official Publications Collaborative Reader Information Service.
    http://www.bopcris.ac.uk/
    You can use this web site to search and browse information from British Official Publications over the period 1688-1995. You can also read abstracts, and view detailed consistent subject indexing, of key documents. You can then read the digitized full-text version of a limited number of these documents.

Organizations

Corporations

Audiovisual/Video

 

Artifactual History (Clothing, Material Culture, Art)

 

Primary Sources for pre-Modern History (Ancient and Medieval)

Why are these different? Historians like to divide history into "modern" and "pre-modern" history. This age-old demarcation is based on the WESTERN division of history at the end of the Middle ages.and the invention of moveable type by Gutenberg. So 1450 is the magical dividing line for many indexes. One wonders what Chinese and the Ottomans/Middle Easterners might think about that. Realistically, I think it has much to do with finding multiple printed materials making it much easier to study and not having to use one of a kind or two or three copies that were hand copied and illuminated by monks. Information was just more prevalent to find, well, in a WESTERN language.

Finding resources. Finding primary source materials for students for Ancient and Medieval periods can be challenging. You will be looking in some cases for archaeological reports, artifacts (photographs in books), art, texts of philosophers and scholars that may be printed in modern editions. Its harder to find evidence of the common man, who often was not literate and would not have written anything down. Such evidence would be in the form of court, landowners records, and church records. Such records would include tax records, estate and household reports, census counts, baptismal records, deeds, etc. Many of these have been published, but under unusual names for our 21st century sense of government structure. As far as non-western materials,most student's do not read ancient Chinese, old style Turkish or Arabic, and no, little has been translated. We can connect the students with appropriate faculty though. For Africa, its also very tough, as most sources are through the colonizers eyes. Pre-colonial materials are often anthropological and early interpretations must be viewed with caution. Looking in the anthropological and art literature will produce artifacts. Probably best to refer a student to me, Bill Wortman, or Rob Withers.

Basic interventions for Pre-modern histories

Primary Sources by Period