Primary vs. Secondary Sources: A Quick Lesson

• Primary Sources

Primary sources are the "materials on a topic upon which subsequent interpretations or studies are based, anything from firsthand documents such as poems, diaries, court records, and interviews to research results generated by experiments, surveys, ethnographies, and so on."

Primary sources are records of events as they are first described, without any interpretation or commentary. They are also sets of data, such as census statistics, which have been tabulated, but not interpreted.




• Secondary Sources

  Secondary sources, on the other hand, offer an analysis or a restatement of primary sources. They often attempt to describe or explain primary sources. Some secondary sources not only analyze primary sources, but also use them to argue a contention or to persuade the reader to hold a certain opinion.
  
  Examples of secondary sources include: dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and books and articles that interpret or review research works.

  	Primary Source	Secondary Source
  Art	Original artwork	Article critiquing the piece of art
  History	Slave diary	Book about the Underground Railroad
  Literature	Poem	Treatise on a particular genre of poetry
  Political Science	Treaty	Essay on Native American land rights
  Theatre	Videotape of a performance	Biography of a playwright

  Reprinted from Bowling Green State University Library Instruction Web Page, http://www.bgsu.edu/colleges/library/infosrv/lue/primary.html

Finding historical research materials
 

• Searching for Monographs Online

  Rohrbach Library Catalog (click on Library Catalog).  The library’s online catalog provides access to books, journal titles (both print and electronic), microforms, audiovisual materials, and all other formats owned by the library. Users can search the database by author, title, subject, and keyword.

  Finding Books – Using Call Numbers: Items in the Main Collection at Rohrbach Library may have Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress (LC) call numbers.  History books are located in two areas in the library:

  • Dewey books – 900s – located on second floor

  • LC books – D (History: General and Old World) and E & F United States and North American history.

  UBorrow: (click on Library Catalogue, then UBorrow) If you cannot find the book you are looking for in the Library catalog, you can use UBorrow to request books from the Keystone Library Network.  This service allows you to search the catalogs of other libraries in the Keystone Library Network and request them using your KU ID card.

  E-ZBorrow, formerly PALCI: (click on PALCI Union Catalogue) You will need your KU ID card to use this service.  E-ZBorrow is a gateway that enables users to simultaneously search academic library catalogs in Pennsylvania. Users may make a loan request directly through PALCI. The library does not charge for this service.

  NOTE: Both of the above services require KU ID card and registration to use (Circulation Desk).

  Access PA: (click on Access PA) This is a catalog that provides access to the library holdings of more than 1400 school, public, academic and special libraries.  If you find an item in this catalog you must then check the Rohrbach Library Catalog to see if KU owns the item, or use UBorrow or E-ZBorrow.

  WorldCat: (click on WorldCat) The most comprehensive and up-to-date bibliographic resource available. This resource contains 49,000,000+ bibliographic records for audio-visual materials, books, maps, musical scores, newspapers, periodicals and more. If you find an item in this catalog you must then check the Rohrbach Library Catalog to see if KU owns the item, or use UBorrow or E-ZBorrow.

  NetLibrary: (click on NetLibrary) NetLibrary provides access to Ebooks (digital full-text versions of books) such as reference works, scholarly monographs, literature and fiction, and public domain titles. Includes over 8,000 titles.

   

• Reference Books (All located in the reference area behind the reference and access services (circulation) desks)

  • Indexes:
    Book Review Digest: H.W. Wilson, 1924-2002
    Book Review Index: Gale, 1965-2002
    Humanities Index. New York : H.W. Wilson, 1974-
    Social Sciences Index. New York : H.W. Wilson, 1974-
    Social Sciences & Humanities Index. New York: H.W. Wilson, 1966-1974
     

  • Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Bibliographies"
    Ref D 114 D5 1982         Dictionary of the Middle Ages (13 volumes)
    Ref D 804.3 E53 1990    Encyclopedia of the Holocaust (4 volumes)
    Ref DA 28 D47                Dictionary of National Biography
    Ref DS 4 E53 2002        Encyclopedia of Modern Asia (2 volumes)
    Ref DT 3 P27 2005         Encyclopedia of African History and Culture (5 volumes)
    Ref E 45 E53 1993         Encyclopedia of the North American Colonies (3 volumes)
    Ref E 174 E53 2003       Encyclopedia of American History (11 volumes)
    Ref E 176 D56                Dictionary of American Biography
    Ref E 183.7 A53 2003    American Foreign Relations Since 1600: A Guide to the Literature (2 volumes)
    Ref E 185 E 54 1996      Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History (5 volumes)
    Ref E 185 K34 1992       Kaiser Index to Black Resources 1948-1986 (5 volumes)
     

  • Government Documents - Located in the Reference Area, all on microfiche cards:
    Congressional Record, 1873-1988
    Annals of Congress, 1789-1824
    Debates in Congress, 1824-1837
    Congressional Globe, 1856-1873
    Congressional Committee Hearings, 1869-1873

The Library subscribes to over 70 electronic databases providing students access to thousands of articles, many in full-text format.  Requires KU ID card and registration to access from off-campus.  Most records can be printed or emailed.  See specific database for more information or ask a Reference Librarian for help.  Below is a list of useful databases for your research.

To access the databases:

• Go to library home page http://www.kutztown.edu/library

• Under the heading Find Information click on “Articles and E-Journals”

• Select “History” in the drop-down menu and click submit to get to the list of appropriate databases. OR

• If you already know the name of the database you’d like to use, click on the appropriate letter to use the alphabetical list of databases.

General Resources – interdisciplinary

Academic Search Complete (EBSCOhost) Excellent multidisciplinary resource.  Provides full-text for nearly 4,000 scholarly publications, including full-text for nearly 4,000 peer-reviewed journals. Coverage spans virtually every area of academic study and offers information dating as far back as 50 years.  Includes a lot of titles in PDF format.

• Can search by keyword, author, title, subject.

• EBSCOhost defaults to Boolean phrase searching.  If your search contains more than two words you need to connect them with an AND, OR, NOT operator.  Example: george washington and (emancipation OR free*) and slaves

• Advanced Search option allows you to further limit your search to Publication type (e.g. Primary Source Document) and/or Document type (e.g. book review).p>

• Check Availability feature checks to see if article is available in another database.

• Folder feature allows you to organize your results.

ProQuest Research Library. (ProQuest) Excellent multidisciplinary resource includes full-text of many scholarly journals.  Always good to check as coverage is different than Academic Search Premier.  Search same as Academic Search Premier.

JSTOR – Arts & Science Collections.  Excellent historical research database includes full-text coverage of scholarly journals some dating back over 100 years, topics include: history, economics, Asian studies, classics, archaeology. African, Latin American, Slavic, Middle Eastern studies, the literary cultures of many different countries.

·         Does not include most recent journals, lag time in publication ranges from 3 and 5 years. Updated continually.

·         Consider doing a title search as you will get more relevant results (JSTOR defaults to keyword searching).

·         Articles are all in pdf and often very long, must be patient with printing.p>

Lexis-Nexis.  Excellent resource for news, business, legal, or medical information. It provides full-text of many newspapers worldwide as well as access to company profiles and financial reports, government transcripts, trade journals, court cases. Includes the full-text of the New York Times and Allentown Morning Call newspapers (recent issues). 

Specialized Resources

African American Newspapers (Accessible Archives) Coverage 1728 to 1880.  This collection of African American Newspapers contains a wealth of information about the cultural life and history during the 1800s, and is rich with first-hand reports of the major events and issues of the day, including the Mexican War, Presidential and congressional addresses, Congressional abstracts, business and commodity markets, the humanities, world travel and religion. They also contain large numbers of early biographies, vital statistics, essays and editorials, poetry and prose, and advertisements all of which embody the African-American experience.

America: History and Life.  Contains citations to articles from over 2,000 historical journals on the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present day. The electronic version contains all citations included in the print version of this title, which indexes articles published since 1954. Some of the citations have links to the full text of electronic journals or articles located in journal databases such as Project Muse and JSTOR. Users can search the database by either keyword or subject and can limit searches in a variety of ways including date, journal title, language, and publication type.

Biography Resource Center. Combines biographies from respected Gale Group publications with full-text articles from hundreds of periodicals. Users can search for people based on one or more personal facts such as birth and death year, nationality, ethnicity, occupation or gender, or combine criteria to create a custom search.

Columbia Gazetteer of the World Online (Columbia) The Columbia Gazetteer of the World Online provides electronic access to a geographical encyclopedia of names, descriptions, and characteristics of over 165,000 places in the world. Entries include demography, physical geography, political boundaries, industry, trade, and service activities, agriculture, cultural, historical, and archeological points of interest, transportation lines, longitude, latitude, and elevations, distance to relevant places, pronunciations, official local government place-names and changed or variant names and spellings.

County Histories (NJ, PA and DE) This database contains the contents of county histories written before 1900.  The books in the database are often the “cornerstone of local historical and genealogical research.”  You can search the contents or browse through the books page by page. 

Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans (Newsbank) Evans Digital Edition is the digital version of Early American Imprints, Series I. Evans (1639-1800) is based on the American Bibliography by Charles Evans and enhanced by Roger Bristol's Supplement to Evans' American Bibliography. This collection is a foundation set for research involving early American history, literature, philosophy, religion, and more. It is the definitive resource for information about every aspect of life in 17th- and 18th-century America, from agriculture and auctions through foreign affairs, diplomacy, literature, music, religion, the Revolutionary War, temperance, witchcraft, etc. The digitization of this collection is an ongoing effort. When completed, Evans Digital Edition will include every item previously produced on microform plus more than 1,200 additional works located, catalogued and digitized since completion of the earlier effort--more than 36,000 works and 2,400,000 images.

Early American Newspapers, Series I:Evans (Newsbank) Early American Newspapers features cover-to-cover reproductions of hundreds of historic newspapers, providing more than one million pages as fully text-searchable facsimile images. For students and scholars of early America, this unique collection -- based largely on Clarence Brigham's "History and Bibliography of American Newspapers,1690-1820" -- offers an unprecedented look back into the extraordinary history of the United States -- the story of its people, ideals, commerce and everyday life.

Ethnic News Watch (ProQuest) (1990 to the present) Ethnic News Watch is a comprehensive full text database of newspapers, magazines and journals of the ethnic, minority and native press. It is a collection of over 830,000 full-text articles from 240 publications. An average of 7,500 new articles is added each month.

GenderWatch (ProQuest) (1970 to the present) GenderWatch reports on the evolution of the women's movement and the changes in gender roles. Publications include academic and scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, books, booklets and pamphlets, conference proceedings, and government, non-governmental organization, and special reports.  

HarpWeek.  Contains digitized images of Harper’s Weekly newspaper.  Every issued ever-published – 1857-1912 – Is contained on this Web site. Can be browsed by date, search index, literature genre, and individuals according to their occupation or social role.

HRAF Collection of Archeology (Yale) The eHRAF Collection of Archaeology is a cross-cultural database containing descriptive information on archaeological traditions of the world.  eHRAF is unique because each archaeological tradition contains a variety of source documents (books, articles, and dissertations) that have been indexed and organized according to HRAF's comprehensive tradition and subject classification systems: the Outline of Archaeological Traditions (OAT), and the Outline of Cultural Materials (OCM).

Historical Abstracts (ABC-CLIO).  Historical Abstracts indexes the world's periodical literature in history and the related social sciences and humanities. The database corresponds to the two companion publications: Historical Abstracts: Part A, Modern History Abstracts (1450-1914) and Historical Abstracts: Part B, Twentieth Century Abstracts (1914 to the Present), produced by ABC-CLIO. Historical Abstracts covers the history of the world from 1450 to the present, excluding the U.S. and Canada, which are covered by America: History and Life.

History Reference Center (EBSCO) History Reference Center is the world's most comprehensive full text history reference database designed for secondary schools, public libraries, junior/community colleges, and undergraduate research. The database features cover-to-cover full text for more than 750 historical encyclopedias and other non-fiction books.  The database also includes full text for nearly 60 leading history periodicals.  Further, the database contains 58,000 historical documents, 43,000 biographies of historical figures, more than 12,000 historical photos and maps, and 87 hours of historical film and video.

Project Muse.  Cooperative effort by publishers to provide the content of over 200 journals in disciplines such as literature and criticism, history, visual and performing arts, cultural studies, education, political science, and gender studies.  Since most of the journals in Project Muse are not of a historical nature, it is usually best to use the Advanced Search in which searches can be limited to subject areas. America: History and Life contains active links to articles contained in Project Muse. You can browse to see what journals are available by clicking on the journals tab at the top of the screen.  You can view an alphabetical list (title list) or a list by subject.  NEW TITLES: Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism and History Workshop Journal.

Pennsylvania Gazette (Accessible Archives) Published in Philadelphia from 1728 through 1800, The Pennsylvania Gazette is considered The New York Times of the 18th century. It provides the reader with a first hand view of colonial America, the American Revolution and the New Republic, and offers important social, political and cultural perspectives of each of the periods. Thousands of articles, editorials, letters, news items and advertisements cover the Western Hemisphere, from the Canadian Maritime Provinces, through the West Indies and North and South America, giving a detailed glimpse of issues and lifestyles of the times. Also included is the full-text of such important writings such as: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Letters from a Farmer, Thomas Payne`s Common Sense, The Federalist Papers, etc.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers—New York Times.  Offers full-text and full-image articles for the New York Times from 1851 to 2003. The collection includes digital reproductions of every page from every issue--cover to cover--in downloadable PDF files.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers—The Wall Street Journal.  Unique full-image archive that brings you the full historical run of The Wall Street Journal, the business newspaper of record. It offers complete coverage from 1889-1989.

Women and Social Movements in the United States (Alexander Street Press) Women and Social Movements in the United States brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women’s activism in public life.

Print Journal Subscriptions

The following list is a selection of some history periodicals to which we currently subscribe.  Current issues can be found in the current periodicals area, back issues are located in the periodical stacks.

Colonial Latin American Historical Review: CLAHR.

Current History

Historical Review of Berks County

Journal of Medieval History

Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies

Pennsylvania History

Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography

Prologue: The Journal of the National Archives.

Speculum

William and Mary Quarterly

Web Searching

Best of History Web Sites. Best of History Web Sites is an award-winning portal created for history teachers, students, and general history enthusiasts.

WWW Virtual Library: History Index.  Index of recommended web sites on all aspects of history.

National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).  This site provides online access to photo and document archives of the United States

Presidential Libraries. Many Presidential Libraries have web sites that provide access to many documents.  Use Google and search for “Eisenhower Presidential Library,” for example, to be directed to the Dwight D. Eisenhower library site.

Library of Congress.  Search the Library of Congress Catalog to find books or use the National Digital Library, which contains millions of digitized documents on American history including Presidential letters and diaries.

Our Documents.  This site presents the text of important American historical documents.

Smithsonian Institution.  The web site for all of the museums.

Local Historical Societies – search for specific sites.  For example the Kutztown Historical Society site can be found by doing a google search on this topic.  These sites may contain local documents and/or databases.

Online Dictionaries.  There are also specialized online dictionaries, you can search for these using a search engine.

Online Encyclopedia.  KU subscribes to the Funk & Wagnalls encyclopedia online.  Use this for a broad overview of a topic.  There are also free online encyclopedias but always be aware of who is writing the content.

Search on your own:  Try doing a Google search by limiting your results to .edu, .org, OR .gov web sites.  For example:

“George Washington” views slavery site:edu

You can also try doing a pdf search for historical papers online (often professors and others will publish papers using adobe for free online).  For example:

“George Washington” views slavery filetype:pdf

When searching in the Library Catalog do a keyword Boolean search and add the word “source” to your search.  Example:

“Thomas Jefferson” and sources

When searching Academic Search Premier, do an advanced search and limit your results to Primary Source Documents by highlighting it in the Publication Type box.

Try some of our specialized databases such as the Historical New York Times, Early American Imprints, Early American Newspapers, Pennsylvania Gazette, African American newspapers, Women and Social Movements.

Try a Google.com search on your topic.  Type in your topic include the words “primary source” and site:edu.  Example:

“American slavery” “primary sources” site:edu

Try this recommended Web Guide: Using Primary Sources on the Web.  An excellent web guide by the University of Washington Library includes search strategies, recommended resources, and evaluation tips.

The Library owns the Library of American Civilization (LAC) collection in microfiche format.  This significant collection includes a great deal of primary source material.  This collection requires the use of special equipment.  Printing costs are $0.25/page.  You can search the collection in the library’s catalog; the call number will indicate LAC and the microfiche number.  Please ask for assistance in the Periodicals Workroom RL203 when using this collection.  A search in the library catalog for “Jefferson” and “LAC” will result in a list of all materials in the LAC collection that mention Jefferson.

Use this part of the library web site to get help with your citations and for links to web sites that can help you build and organize your citations.  Chicago (Turabian) style is used by KU’s history department.

Reference Assistance – Reference Desk, Main Floor, 610-683-4165.  Professional Reference Librarians are available to assist you 7-days a week.   If you are having problems finding resources contact a reference librarian.  They will be able to guide you to the most appropriate resource.

Document Delivery – Articles, Contact: Joanne Bucks, bucks@kutztown.edu,  610-683-4158

If the Library does not own a specific journal title or full-text electronic access, you may request that the Periodicals Department staff retrieve a specific article for you.  For more complete information and an online request form visit our article request page.  Patrons can search our document delivery service on their own and then request articles through Joanne Bucks.

Interlibrary loan – Books, Contact: Miguel Nieves, mnieves@kutztown.edu, 610-683-1385

Students can request books that we do not own from other libraries.  Two patron-initiated services include UBorrow and EZ Borrow (you will need your library card to access).  In addition, the library will order books that are not available using the above services.  For more complete information and an online request form visit http://www.kutztown.edu/library/services/borrowing_materials/index.asp

• Start with the Library Catalog and some of the big multidisciplinary resources like Academic Search Premier and ProQuest to see what you can find full-text to get a sense of what’s out there on your topic.  If it’s at least touched on in these resources you will probably be able to find enough information.

• Move on the specialized resources like America History and Life, Project Muse, Historical newspapers, etc.p>

• Look for primary source documents in some of the recommended sources; also check with local or regional archives and special collections.

• Don’t hesitate to ask your professor and/or a librarian for research assistance.

For more assistance 

The history library liaison is Stephanie Steely; she can be reached at 610-683-4745, steely@kutztown.edu.  You can contact her to schedule a research session.  Also, the Reference Librarians are here to help you with your research.  For in-depth assistance, it might be best to schedule an appointment with a librarian for the best service.  To request an appointment send an email to refquest@kutztown.edu or call 610-683-4165.  Reference librarians are available 7 days a week.  Reference desk service hours during the regular semester are: 

Sunday 2 – 10pm
Monday – Thursday 8am – 10pm
Friday 8am – 4pm
Saturday 9am –12pm; 1 – 5pm
RF&KP 2/2007