Research Guides: History Research Guide: Primary Sources

Steps for Searching for Primary Sources

Try these steps:

Search the Library catalog using your preferred keywords AND search SUBJECTS like: correspondence, diaries, or personal narratives
Search in WorldCat. Access through HSU Library Databases A-Z link. Also try a keyword and subjects search. Your searches might pull internet, archival, map, and sound recording resources
Search the Internet. There are many great special and digital collections out there, but it's a matter of finding them for topics. Try including phrases like "primary sources" or "digital collections" in your internet searches.
1. RUSA: Primary Sources for Historical Research
2. MIT Libraries: History: Finding Primary Sources: Library of Congress Subject Headings

Books

Finding Primary Sources in Books

These are some of the most commonly used subject headings to describe published books that include primary sources. Do a subject keyword search in the Cal Poly Humboldt Catalog to locate primary sources in books:

Correspondence
Description and travel
Diaries
Interviews
Personal narratives
Pictorial works

Narrowing Down by Topic

Now that we know how to locate primary sources in books, try adding additional subject keywords to locate books on your topic of interest. Some examples may include:

Japanese Americans interviews
World War, 1914-1918 personal narratives
Civil War diaries
Mexico description and travel

Online Repositories & Resources

Internet History Sourcebooks Project at Fordham University is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts
Legal/treaties/international: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/20th.asp

Middle East Studies

Photographs

There are several places to search for photographs as primary resources. Try these to start:

Humboldt Room Photograph Collections
HSU's Humboldt Room contains historical photographs related to Humboldt County and Northwestern California.
Calisphere
Calisphere is the University of California's free public gateway to a world of primary sources. More than 200,000 digitized items — including photographs, documents, newspaper pages, political cartoons, works of art, diaries, transcribed oral histories, advertising, and other unique cultural artifacts — reveal the diverse history and culture of California and its role in national and world history.
Library of Congress Prints & Photographs
The Prints & Photographs Collection include photographs, fine and popular prints and drawings, posters, and architectural and engineering drawings. While international in scope, the collections are particularly rich in materials produced in, or documenting the history of, the United States and the lives, interests and achievements of the American people.
Cal State IMAGE Project
IMAGE provides access to CSU collections of images for teaching and research. The collection includes images for the art history survey and historical images from a wide variety of fields, including political and cultural history, anthropology, biology, medicine and technology.
Getty Open Content Images
Getty Open Content Images contains images from the Research Institute's Foto Arte Minore archive, which features photographs of Italian art and architecture, as well as images of paintings, drawings, manuscripts, photographs, antiquities, sculpture, decorative arts, artists' sketchbooks, watercolors, rare prints from the 16th through the 18th century, and 19th-century architectural drawings of cultural landmarks.

Primary Sources

Definition

A primary source is:

a contemporaneous, firsthand account of an event;
data obtained through original research;
original, creative works of art such as poems or paintings, etc.

Examples

Primary sources can be:

manuscripts;
diaries or journals;
correspondence or letters;
photographs;
newspaper clippings;
government documents;
interviews or oral histories;
original works of art.

Primary sources can also be reproduced in published books such as:

Anderson, William Marshall. The Rocky Mountain Journals of William Marshall Anderson: the West in 1834. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1967.

This book tells the firsthand account of William Anderson's travels through the American West in the early 1830s, even though the book was published in 1967.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are works that interpret or analyze primary research, data, or firsthand accounts of an event.

References

"Primary Sources," Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science (ODLIS). http://www.abc-clio.com/ODLIS/odlis_A.aspx. Accessed April 14, 2014.
"Using Primary Resources on the Web," Reference and User Services Association. http://www.ala.org/rusa/sections/history/resources/pubs/usingprimarysources. Accessed April 14, 2014.