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Identifying Primary and Secondary Sources: A Preliminary Guide The materials,
evidence, or data used in your research are known as sources. As foundations of your research, these
sources of information are typically classified into two broad categories—primary and secondary. Primary Sources A primary source provides direct or
firsthand evidence about an event, object, person or work of art. Characteristically, primary sources are
contemporary to the events and people described and show minimal or no
mediation between the document/artifact and its creator. As to the format, primary source materials
can be written and non-written, the latter including sound, picture, and
artifact. Examples of primary sources
include:
Secondary Sources A secondary source, in contrast, lacks the
immediacy of a primary record. As
materials produced sometime after an event happened, they contain information
that has been interpreted, commented, analyzed or processed in such a way that
it no longer conveys the freshness of the original. History textbooks, dictionaries,
encyclopedias, interpretive journal articles, and book reviews are all examples
of secondary sources. Secondary sources
are often based on primary sources.
Primary and Secondary Sources Compared An example from the
printed press serves to further distinguish primary from secondary
sources. In writing a narrative of the
political turmoil surrounding the 2000 Bear in mind,
however, that primary and secondary sources are not
fixed categories. The use of evidence as
a primary or secondary source hinges on the type of research you are
conducting. If the researcher of the
2000 presidential election were interested in people’s perceptions of the
political and legal electoral controversy, the Op/Ed columns will likely be
good primary sources for surveying public opinion of these landmark
events. The chart below
illustrates possible uses of primary and secondary sources by discipline:
Primary Source Searching in IUCAT Use the IU online
library catalog (IUCAT) to look for primary source materials. Employ the Library
of Congress subject heading subdivisions below to retrieve primary materials
from IUCAT. These subdivisions indicate
the form in which the material is organized and presented.
Primary Source Search Examples Use the subject
subdivisions to build search statements that may include names, events or
topics. Below is a select sample of
library catalog searches. Enter these
terms and search for as Subject in
IUCAT. You may also wish to try search
for a Keyword Anywhere which will
give you a larger but less focused result. Use the AND operator to combine ideas; for
example, novelists and correspondence. AND will find your search words in any
section of the subject headings and will increase the likelihood that you will
find relevant material.
feminism AND history AND sources Roosevelt Franklin AND archives
American AND speeches Douglass Frederick AND speeches statesmen AND speeches
novelists AND correspondence rap musicians AND interviews working class women AND diaries
inscriptions AND documentary photography AND Salgado Sebastião AND
exhibitions painting AND Australian aboriginal
AND exhibitions
advertising AND catalogs advertising AND collectibles AND catalogs commercial art AND catalogs
biographical films AND Mahatma Gandhi documentary films AND race relations documentary films AND sports Further Information The following web
sites offer good information on primary source research resources:
http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ndlpedu/lessons/psources/source.html http://ww2.lafayette.edu/~library/guides/primarysources/home.html http://www.library.yale.edu/ref/err/primsrcs.htm http://www.library.yale.edu/ref/handouts/lcshprim.html
http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/PrimarySources.html Ask a Librarian For further
assistance with identifying primary sources for your project, please contact a library
subject specialist or a librarian at the reference desks in the Undergraduate
Library Services or the Research Collections Reference Department in the Main
Library. You can also send a question to
“Ask a Librarian” at libref@indiana.edu. Written by Luis A. González Reference
Department Main Library August 2002 |