University of Wisconsin-Parkside Library: Guides and Tutorials

Definitions: What are primary and secondary sources?
Locating primary source material
Locating secondary source material

Definitions

What is a primary source?
Primary sources are original records created at the time an event occurred or memoirs and oral histories created afterwards. Primary sources include letters, manuscripts, diaries, journals, speeches, interviews, memoirs, records produced by government agencies, business records, photographs, audio recordings, and moving pictures or video recordings. Newspapers are considered primary sources by many scholars, but others view them as secondary sources since reporters are usually writing about events that happened to some else. Primary sources serve as the raw material to interpret the past, and when they are used along with previous studies by historians, they provide the resources necessary for historical research.

What is a secondary source?
Secondary sources are usually written after an event has occurred and attempt to analyze and interpret the event utilizing primary sources. Dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and books and articles that interpret or review research works are examples of secondary sources. An edited or annotated primary source is also a secondary source.

Examples of both types of sources:

	Primary Source	Secondary Source
Art	Painting or sculpture	Article critiquing the piece of art
History	Slave diary	Book about the Underground Railroad
Literature	Hamlet	An article examining psychoanalytic elements pervasive in Hamlet.
Political Science	U.N. Resolution	Essay on Resolution 1441's Impact
Theatre	Videotape of a performance	Biography of the playwright

Locating Primary Source Material

The majority of primary documentation is available only in its original format, but an increasing amount of primary material is now available online as well. Publicly accessible online resources include:

American Memory: Historical Collections of the Library of Congress
[http://memory.loc.gov/]

University of Wisconsin Digital Collections: Documents, audio and video files, maps and other primary source materials held at UW schools.
[http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/]

Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy
http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/

EuroDocs: Western European Primary Historical Documents
[http://library.byu.edu/~rdh/eurodocs/]

Making of America: 19th c. books and magazines

Online primary materials may be digitized versions of the original such as this scan of an 1840 letter:

or they may be a transcription of the original material, as in this page from an 1879 journal:

1879 journal

Before using online content, it is advisable to attempt to verify that the content of the material is reliable. This is true of all online material, but for tips on judging online primary source material, this web page [http://www.lib.washington.edu/subject/History/RUSA/#three] can be quite helpful.

In addition to freely accessible online collections, UW-Parkside makes a number of primary source collections available to our students, faculty and staff. These collections can be viewed on campus, or off campus once the user verifies her UW-Parkside email account:

Early Encounters in North America

North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries and Oral Histories

North American Women's Letters and Diaries

The UW-Parkside Library also has many primary source materials in its collection that are not available online. One example are pamphlets published in the early 19th century by the temperance movement in the United States:

pamphlets

The UW-Parkside Archives, which is housed on the D-2 level of the Library, has extensive primary collection holdings on a wide variety of topics. Primary source material on Wisconsin history, local industries, political representatives, and the university itself are only a small sampling of what is available in the Archives.

Locating Secondary Source Material

Because secondary sources are written after the fact and are interpretations or analyzes of something else, secondary sources are far more plentiful than primary sources. The majority of books in the Library’s catalog are secondary sources—materials written by scholars about events, people or literature.

Articles in scholarly journals are an excellent source for secondary source material. The best way to find articles on a particular subject is to visit the UW-Parkside Library Periodicals page and/or the UW-Parkside Library Subject Portals page.

Huge quantities of secondary source material are available via the Web—finding material on a particular topic using Google, Yahoo or similar search engines is usually not difficult. The hard part is making sure that what you find is reliable, accurate and unbiased. For help with evaluating Web content, this page, from the New Mexico State University Library, is very helpful.