ENG 450 Research Writing - Austin

Primary sources are original documents or artifacts created by a person who witnessed or participated in an event. They can be firsthand testimony or evidence created during the time period that you are studying.

Primary sources include these kinds of resources:

• diaries, autobiographies or memoirs
• letters, texts, blogs or emails 
• interviews, oral histories
• photographs or videos
• newspaper articles
• government documents or reports
• contemporary surveys or opinion polls
• movies, poems, novels, plays, art and music

You can find Primary sources in a lot of different places, both online and in person.  Here's a quick list of some of the most common places to find Primary sources:

Where to find Primary Sources:

• Archives (there are a lot of different kinds of archives)
• Local History museums
• Large National museums
• Library special collections
• Library of Congress
• Hathi Trust
• New York Public Library
• Newspapers and anywhere that reports news
• Autobiographical books
• Government agencies

How do I know which museum or archive to use?

There are a number of guides and lists online that can help you match up the topic you want to research with an appropriate archive or other source.  These are sometimes called Finding Tools or Guides.  Check out this list of Primary Source Research Guides:

• Archive Grid for finding collections by location

• Online Archive of California for finding local california collections

There are a number of collections freely available online that include a wealth of primary source documents. Links are included below to Research Guides which list many of these sites.

One example of an extensive guide is the Primary Source Database Research Guide put together by Librarians at the University of Nebraska. This guide includes a whole host of online resources, some of them freely accessible, that will allow researchers to search and read primary documents including newspapers, letters, documents, reports, etc., dating back hundreds of years. Please note that many of the newspaper collections in this guide are not available to anyone outside University of Nebraska.

Two important sites of particular interest in this guide include:

• Library of Congress Digital Collections
  • Take some time to explore the collections you find here to see if any might be of interest
  • These online collections include a collection of historical newspapers that date from the late 18th Century into the 20th Century. The collection, titled Chronicling America, is fully searchable and fairly straightforward to use. 
• State Digital Resources: Memory Projects, Online Encyclopedias, Historical & Cultural Materials Collections
  • This collection is set up alphabetically by state name, so is a great place to investigate collections and events tied to a specific state

Both of the above sites include many, many collections that may be worth exploring for your chosen topic.

If you do not find what you want in the links above, search Google for historical societies connected to an event or organization to see what might be available. Input a place name, person name, or event name plus the words historical society or historical archives or just archives to see what results you find 

In addition to the suggested collections & strategies above, click on JSTOR here or on the Library homepage, to search for primary documents, images, and more. To find primary documents in JSTOR - 

• Enter your search terms in the JSTOR advance search boxes
• From the results page, at the left under Refine Results, click on Content I Can Access
• Further down the same column click on some or all of the options under the heading, Primary Source Content