Finding Primary Resources and Manuscript collections
Distinguishing Primary from Secondary Sources
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General Tips for Finding Primary Resources
- Have a good understanding of the topic - read and absorb information in encyclopedias and secondary sources. You need to know more about when an event happened, the duration of the event, where it happened and what players might have been involved.
- Good scholarly secondary sources will often list primary sources in the bibliography or in footnotes. Follow up on these leads.
- Identify persons involved with the topic (government officials, eye-witnesses, writers of the time period). Biographical databases such as American National Biography and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are great places to look for key British and American people and each entry lists additional sources.
- Use the names of key people or organizations in author searches within our online catalog or Worldcat. Search the position that they may have held, e.g. United States President, Ambassadors, Missionaries etc.), to find papers, letters, memoirs, autobiographies.
- Identify materials written at the time of your event by using date limits in catalogs and indexes.
- The presence of the word "sources" in a subject heading always indicates a primary sources or reprints of primary sources. For example, "Great Britain -- Colonies -- History -- Sources"
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For some interesting ideas about reading and understanding primary sources see:
"Reading primary sources : the interpretation of texts from nineteenth- and twentieth-century history" / edited by Miriam Dobson and Benjamin Ziemann. London ; New York : Routledge, 2009. CASE Main D16 .R23 2009
Locating primary sources through Colgate's Library Catalog
- Search the names of key people or organizations in author searches (including the position that they may have held, e.g. United States President, Secretaries of State, Ambassadors, Missionaries etc.), to find papers, letters, memoirs, autobiographies. These works will often contain information about the location of manuscript collections or the location of a specific manuscript.
- The following words often appear in the subject headings for recrods of primary sources.
Combine these keywords with your search topic:
sources
archives [use for people or organizations]
facsimiles
correspondence [use with names of people, families, ethnic groups, organizations]
description and travel [use with names of places]
diaries
journals
interviews
notebooks
speeches
sermons
pamphlets
personal narratives [use only with armed conflicts or events]
pictorial works
photographs
caricatures and cartoons
diplomatic history [used only with armed conflicts]
treaties (used with subjects, geographic areas, ethnic groups, wars)
- Limit a search by date. For example search "fugitive slaves " in ENCORE and refine your search by date using the menu on the left hand side of the screen. In the classic catalog search "China" as a subject heading and then click the limit/sort search button at the top of the screen. In year of publication indicate before 1900. If you limit by date, be aware that you may miss modern reprints of older materials.
- Limit a search to the location of "Case Special Collections." Most likely you will be searching for an author, but this will also work for Exact Subject or Subject Key word searches. Examine the records to determine if manuscripts are part of the collection you have discovered.
Search the catalogs of other libraries
- Try these types of searches in Worldcat. Tip for searching for manuscripts: Use "advanced search" and search the "Notes" field for "manuscript+". In many cases it will be necessary to visit sites that have manuscript collections. In some instances copies of specific manuscripts may be requested. Some collections have also been reproduced on microfilm. If this is the case, borrowing or purchasing the film is often possible.
- Search the holdings of the Center for Research Libraries. These records also appear in the ConnectNY catalog. Tip for finding these records in ConnectNY: Choose "keyword search". Type in your keyword and choose location "crl".
Search Databases
- The library subscribes to a large number of primary source databases. To find what we have choose "Articles" from the main library web site. Select a subject such as History. Look for sections on "newspapers, historical" or "primary sources" within the subject guide.
- Some notable newspaper databases available to Colgate: New York Times (1851—), Times (London) (1785-1985), African Americans newspapers (1827-1868), America’s Historical newspapers (1690-1922) and the 17th and 18th century Burney collection
- Some notable databases containing older books, pamphelts, sermons, broadsides are: Early American Imprints I (1639-1800), Early American Imprints II (1801-1819), and Early English Books (1478-1700).
- The Online Primary Source Chronology can be helpful in deciding which resources cover specific periods and regions. It lists online resources which may include primary sources in order by earliest date of coverage.
- Some of these database can be tricky to search. This advanced search tips guide is useful for key history databases.
- When in doubt you can also consult a Reference Librarian
US Government Documents
- Refer to the U.S. Government websites guide created by the Head of Government Documents.
American Popular Periodicals which might be used as primary resources
Selected Primary Sources in British History
OAIster
- OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources and was developed to test the feasibility of building a portal to open-archive collections using the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH). OAIster can be searched by Title, Author/Creator, Subject, Language or Entire Record. Searches can also be limited by resource type (text, image, audio, video, dataset) and sorted by title, author, date and hit frequency. Results allow further limiting by data contributor (i.e., where the record was harvested from).
Further help for finding manuscripts
Ash, Lee.
Subject collections : a guide to special book collections and
subject emphases as reported by university, college, public, and special libraries and museums in the United States and
Canada / compiled by Lee Ash and William G. Miller, with the collaboration of Barry Scott, Kathleen Vickery, and Beverly McDonough.
7th ed., rev. and enl.
New Providence, NJ : R.R. Bowker Co., c1993.
CASE Ref. Z731 .A78 1993
This is a good starting point since many subject collections contain manuscript materials. If you identify a library with collection of interest, it might be worth checking for a web site. Special Collections libraries may provide finding aids for particular collections and these are often available online. This can be a useful strategy anytime you identify a library with a collection of interest.
Survey the following ranges in the Reference Collection---CD 995-- CD 3447 and Z 723-- to see if there are any books that might help. These ranges contain catalogs of various types---regional, subject, time period, specific libraries. Many describe European collections of manuscripts. Of particular local interest is the set entitled Guide to Historical Resources in ... . Each volume describes collections in repositories within a county in New York State. (Call number CD 3407...).