Primary sources are generally considered to be the first-hand account or the artifacts of a historical event, person or culture, such as diaries, contemporary observations (such as newspaper articles), audio and video recordings, photographs, maps, oral histories, etc. Primary sources are also defined as any original artistic creation, such as a painting, a novel, or a piece of music.
Secondary sources are works that synthesize or interpret primary source material.
Learn more at the Primary vs. Secondary Sources tab in the Library Orientation Research Guide.
Before you begin your search for primary sources, decide what type of material you need. Do you need letters? Diaries? Newspaper articles? Photographs? You can save time searching if you know what you want.
For example, if you need to use a person's diary who lived in Massachusetts during the Colonial period, you can create an efficient search strategy in Google: (diary OR diaries) Massachusetts. This search may not lead you directly to a full-text diary, but it will most probably bring up the websites of historical societies or museums that have digitized full-text primary source materials and made them available through their website.
The UDC Library subscribes to many databases that include primary source content. This list contains a selection of those databases. See the A-Z Resource List for the complete list of databases.
ARTstor is a nonprofit digital library of more than one million images in the arts, architecture, humanities, and social sciences with a suite of software tools to view, present, and manage images for research and pedagogical purposes.
Dig DC is your web portal for selected digitized and born-digital items from DC Public Library Special Collections, including the Washingtoniana collections and the Black Studies Center at Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library in downtown Washington, D.C. and the Peabody Room at the Georgetown Neighborhood Library.
Newspapers and newswires report information via research, interviews, surveys, speeches, etc. They can provide the latest information on what people are thinking about your topic. Reading different newspapers may provide different perspectives for you to consider in your research.
Newspapers and newswires are available in the following databases:
An excellent basic collection for undergraduate research needs. Find journals and books in social sciences, humanities, science, medicine, technology and more. This extensive collection of 10,033 active full-text journals covers a wide range of subject areas offering thousands of international journals to provide global context to research as well as videos to support and enhance the research experience.
Newsbank Access World News provides a combination of global, regional, and local news, including a unique merging of news formats (PDF image editions, web-only, full-text), this resource supports a diverse range of research needs across an array of academic disciplines for students and faculty.
This database offers unparalleled access to the full text of over 190 Canadian newspapers from Canada's leading publishers. This full text database includes the complete available electronic backfile for most newspapers, providing full access to the articles, columns, editorials and features published in each. Some backfiles date as far back as the late 1970s.
In the modern news world, newswires are the chief source of timely news and, with increasing pressures on the traditional news industry, newswires are often the only news coverage for many large regions of the globe.
International Newsstream provides the most recent news content outside of the US and Canada, with archives which stretch back decades featuring newspapers, newswires, and news sites in active full-text format. ProQuest International Newsstream provides information from more than 660 of the world's top newspapers, including The Times (London), The Bangkok Post, El Norte, Financial Times, The Guardian, Jerusalem Post, South China Morning Post, The Daily Telegraph, Asian Wall Street Journal, and the BBC Monitoring series of publications.
From business and political science to literature and psychology, ProQuest Research Library provides one-stop access to a wide range of popular academic subjects. The database includes more than 4,070 titles—nearly 2,800 in full text—from 1971 forward. It features a highly-respected, diversified mix of scholarly journals, trade publications, magazines, and newspapers.
75 business journals, newspapers and newswires covering all metropolitan and rural areas within the United States.
Enables users to search the most recent premium U.S. news content, as well as archives which stretch back into the 1980s featuring top newspapers, newswires, blogs, and news sites in active full-text format
