ES 201: Inventing Ethnic America

Primary sources are materials produced by participants or observers at the time of an event or during a particular span of years. They are "original" in that the recording of the event or experience originates with the participants or direct observers. Some examples of primary sources are:

• Diaries, journals, memoirs, letters, autobiographies
• Official documents or records from government or private organizations (minutes, reports, etc.)
• Books, magazines, and newspapers produced at the time of the event
• Court decisions, transcripts, and other legal papers
• Research data (reports, market surveys, public opinion polls, statistics)
• Films, photographs, paintings, video recordings
• Novels, poetry, and plays

The University Archives is the repository for official and unofficial records that document OSU's history. Our collections include historical records of enduring value generated by faculty, academic departments, administrative offices, students, and campus organizations.

 

Secondary sources are materials that interpret, analyze, describe, or explain primary sources. Textbooks, encyclopedias, biographies, and journal articles are examples of secondary sources. These sources are "secondary" in that usually they are one step removed from the event about which they comment or analyze. Use catalogs and databases to find secondary source books and articles. These sources will build your background knowledge about your topic. Use them to inform yourself about what scholar's say about your topic.

 

Academic Year Hours: Monday - Friday: 9:00am - 5:00pm

Please visit the OSU Archives Location & Hours Site for more information.

Use these catalogs to find books at OSU & elsewhere.

OSU Library Catalog: search for books located at Valley library and OSU's other libraries.

OSU Archives

The University Archives is the repository for official and unofficial records that document OSU's history. Our collections include historical records of enduring value generated by faculty, academic departments, administrative offices, students, and campus organizations.

• What Will I Find There? Diaries and Journals, Letters/Correspondence, Institutional and Business Records, Photographs and other Visual Images, Maps, Blueprints, and Plans, Transcripts and Recordings of Oral History Interviews or Oral Traditions, Sound and Video Recordings, Physical Artifacts

Oregon Multicultural Archives

The OSU Libraries' Oregon Multicultural Archives acquires, preserves, and makes available collections that document the lives and activities of African American, Asian American, Latino and Native American communities of Oregon.

Unique at OSU: OSU Libraries Digital Collections

Collections of digitized documents, photographs, maps and data that have been described and organized by OSU Libraries to make them more widely accessible for researchers, students, and the general public.

ScholarsArchive

This digital service of the OSU Libraries provides a permanent means for faculty members to store their research and teaching output, for students to do the same with their research, to make the information widely available and for the institution to maintain its historical record.

Northwest Digital Archives

The NWDA provides enhanced access to archival and manuscript collections in Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Alaska, and Washington through a union database of Encoded Archival Description (EAD) finding aids.

• Search these databases to see what scholars have written about your topic.

• Academic Search Premier
  Provides full text for many scholarly journals on a wide variety of subjects and disciplines.
  Coverage Dates: 1975 - present
• Clase y Periodica
  Index of Latin American journals in the sciences and humanities. Lists article citation information.
  Coverage Dates: 1975
• Fuente Academica
  Scholarly academic journal articles from renowned Latin American, South American and Spanish publishers. Full text and in Spanish.
  Coverage Dates: 1992 - present
• JSTOR
  An archival collection of journal articles in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. It does not provide access to the most current issues of the journals.
  Coverage Dates: Varies by Journal
• Project Muse
  Interdisciplinary collection of full-text peer reviewed journals.
  Coverage Dates: Varies by journal
• Sociological Abstracts
  Index to articles from journals in sociology, social work and other social sciences.
  Coverage Dates: 1963 - present

Braceros in Oregon Photographic Collection

Key Subjects for your class

• Agriculture and Farm Labor
• World War II

Due to armed forces manpower requirements and competition with higher paying jobs in the defense industries, the early 1940s saw a noticeable decrease in the number of farm workers in the United States. At the same time, farmers were asked to increase production as part of their efforts to support World War II.

In 1942, the United States government signed a labor agreement with Mexico that allowed its male citizens to work as farm laborers throughout the U.S. It was known as the Braceros Program. In Oregon more than 15,000 Mexican men worked on farms in all parts of the state from 1942 through 1947.

The 102 photographs in this collection document the activities of Oregon's Bracero workers, recording their cultivation and harvesting work in the fields and orchards, as well as the farm labor camps in which they lived.

For more information, check out the Extension Service Records (RG 111)

The county extension office annual reports for those counties in which Braceros worked during WWII often include a section on how many workers were utilized in the county and the types of work done. Some of the reports also include narrative on problems that the workers encountered. These reports are on microfilm only.

 

Oregon Multicultural Archives

Key Subjects for your class

• Ethic communities in Oregon
• State history
• Oregon State University programs, departments, communities
• Politics
• Oral Histories
  

The Oregon Multicultural Archives Collection documents the lives and activities of the African American, Asian American, Latino and Native American communities in Oregon, reflecting how these communities have contributed to the identity of the state of Oregon.

For more general information about cultural and ethnic groups on campus, check out the OMA's Guides & Collections page.

To see a sampling of images drawn from the archival collections that form the Oregon Multicultural Archives, check out the Oregon Multicultural Archives Digital Collection.

Urban League of Portland Records

Key Subjects for your class

• Race relations
• National Urban League
• African Americans
• Neighborhood Revitalization

The Urban League of Portland was established in 1945 as an affiliate of the National Urban League. It is a non-profit, community-based organization whose mission has been to "enable African Americans to secure economic self-reliance, parity and power, and civil rights." The League has emphasized educational opportunity for African Americans and other youth, advocated for fair housing laws, and offered employment assistance.
2450 photographs and 140 videotapes

Gerald Williams Collection
Key Subjects for your class

• Native Americans
• Forest/environmental history

The Gerald W. Williams Collection consists of Williams' personal papers, historic photograph collection, and related materials pertaining to the history of the U.S. Forest Service as well as the forestry, environmental history, Native Americans, and geography especially of the Pacific Northwest. Williams assembled and created the materials during his career as sociologist and national historian with the U.S. Forest Service.
24,000 photographs

 

SEE ALSO:The OPB Oregon Experience pages

The Oregon Story series explores Oregon's ever-changing social, cultural and economic relationships with the land. Each story is supplemented by an online site that provides additional facts, educational tools and a starting point for further discovery.

 

Newspaper articles can be a great source for information about current social justice issues. Try these databases for newspaper (and magazine) articles. If the full-text is not listed, use the catalog to search for a paper or an electronic version. 

Alternative Press Index: index to alternative, radical and left periodicals, newspapers and magazines.

Lexis Nexis: international and national newspapers. Be sure to change the date limit to All Available Dates.

Oregon Index: Citations to Oregon newspapers,1975-present.

PressDisplay: even more international and national newspapers, only last 60 days, best with Internet Explorer.

Photo by by Trois Têtes (TT). Flickr Creative Commons.

ArchivesGrid

This is a service provided by RLG, a non-profit organization of libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural institutions. It is a centralized index to archival collections located throughout the world and is a valuable resource for locating records in other archives.

OCLC WorldCat

WorldCat is a global network of libraries that unite their collections in one master catalog. It is a union catalog of over 49 million records representing books, journals, dissertations, audio-visual materials, and manuscripts in repositories worldwide.

There are lots of primary source materials in libraries around the country; this catalog holds a growing number of more than 6,000 links to online finding aids. Included in their genealogy search are books, ship passenger lists, historical society records, archival photos, articles on research techniques, family histories, and digital image collections.

National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections (NUCMC)

The National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections is a print and online catalog of manuscript collections held in US repositories. The Library of Congress provides a Web interface for searching archival and manuscript cataloging in OCLC WorldCat.

• This service is provided free-of-charge.

National Inventory of Documentary Sources in the United States (NIDS)

By bringing together thousands of finding aids from libraries and archives across the United States and reproducing them on microfiche with a unified index, NIDS gives users unparalleled access to federal, state, academic and other documentary sources. In allowing researchers to examine actual finding aids, NIDS goes further than either NUCMC or RLIN which offer collection-level descriptions, but do not contain detailed listings of the contents of collections.

• This service is fee-based.

ArchivesUSA

This is a current directory of over 5,500 repositories and more than 161,000 collections of primary source material across the United States. NUCMUC & NIDS were folded into this database.

Using ArchivesUSA, researchers are able to read descriptions of a repository's holdings to determine whether a collection contains material useful to their work as well as find the information they need to contact the repository directly. Repository records provide detailed information including phone and fax numbers, hours of service, materials solicited, email and home page URLs when available. Each collection record links to its corresponding repository record, simplifying the research process.

• This service is fee-based.

Repositories of Primary Sources

This is a listing of over 5000 websites describing holdings of manuscripts, archives, rare books, historical photographs, and other primary sources for the research scholar. Includes international archives.

UNESCO Archives Portal

The UNESCO Archives Portal gives access to websites of archival institutions around the world. It is also a gateway to resources related to records and archives management and to international co-operation in this area.

Use the LexisNexis Congressional Index to identify congressional publications (hearings, serial set, house/senate reports and documents, etc) from 1789-present. Once identified, then find the full text in print, microfiche, or online depending on availability. 

OSU Libraries' guide to Government Information, gives an overview of government publications and how to get them. See this guide for information about Congressional Publications at OSU. Includes links to Congressional Hearings.

Using the microform machines can be a fun, challenging, and unique experience! And probably unlike anything else you will do in your research adventure.

We have 6 machines, all found on the 3rd floor of The Valley Library. 3 of the machines offer a scanning option, and one is coin operated.

Library staff will be happy to help you, but for who would rather go it alone, we have created a tutorial in Flickr.

• Microform Tutorial

There are also instructions posted next to each machine and on the Archives' Microform Guidance page .

 

OSU's Page

There are a number of tutorials on the web, some examples are:

• Princeton University
  
• University of Southern Mississippi
• University of Washington

Citation Style Resources:

• Online sources from Bedford St. Martin's
• Citation Machine 

Archival materials such as manuscripts, photographs, departmental papers, oral histories, and diaries are unique items that often require complex citations. When citing archival resources, keep these points in mind:

• Unlike the books and journals in a library, most archival materials are one of a kind. Thus, citations should not only identify the source, but also the repository where the source is located.
• Collection title and any collection call numbers should always be included in the citation.
  
• Archival collections can consist of hundreds of boxes worth of materials, so make sure that you always include specific information about the portion of the collection you are referring to, including information about the the page, date, or filing unit (box/folder) in which the item is found.
• Individual archival repositories often have different methods of organizing their records; therefore, having a consistent rule for all archival citations is not necessarily possible. If you are unsure about the structure of your citation, remember that its purpose is to guide the reader to your source: providing more information is always better than not enough. Never hesitate to ask the Archivist, a librarian, or your professor for assistance.
  

For more information and specific examples, please visit our How to Cite Materials from OSU Archives page. 

 

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