Social Sciences & Humanities Collections Librarian Valley Library-Fourth Floor (541) 737-7269 jane.nichols@oregonstate.edu
About this Guide
Primary sources are rich resources -- full of historical nuances, unfiltered information, uncensored observations. While your research can gain breadth and depth by using archival materials, it can be a bit tricky to access the items... Remember that we want you to use our collections, find those historical gems, and walk away happy and satisfied!
This guide will provide guidance on how to access the historical materials in the OSU collections.
Secondary sources help build your background knowledge about your topic. They are used to interpret primary sources, so you can think of them as report that is at least one step removed from the event or issue you are studying. In this sense, secondary sources are like second-hand accounts…
If I tell you something, then I am the primary source.
If you tell someone else what I told you, then you are the secondary source.
You can use secondary sources to interpret, analyze, describe, explain, or draw conclusions about the events or issues detailed in primary sources. Usually, you’ll find secondary sources in the form published works like articles found in scholarly journals that evaluate or criticize someone else's original research, books, biographies, book or movie reviews, encyclopedias, or popular magazines, but they may take the form of a documentary or conference proceedings.
Primary sources are the raw materials of history, providing a window into the past and unfiltered access to the historical record. They are the first-hand accounts, in a range of formats, which were produced by people who lived during that period. In an archive of primary source materials, you’ll find a record of the cultural, social, economic, political, and scientific inquiries of the time.
For a more detailed explanation of the variety of different types of formats, visit the “Primary Sources at Yale” page.
These records give you access to unique items that are often profoundly personal in nature that can serve as powerful tools to give you a realistic sense of what it was like to be alive in an earlier time. The letters, pictures, memoirs, and records of everyday life tell us something about the past that even the best-written article or book cannot convey.
When you use primary sources in your research, you can also develop skills for understanding how the larger historical context informed peoples’ actions or decisions, but also how to read the subtext of cultural assumptions and ambiguities.
In short, using primary sources in history transcends the role of just learning facts and figures. It encourages critical thinking skills; introducing you to issues of context, selection, and bias; to the nature of collective memory and to other like aspects in the construction of history. It allows you use the traces of the past to construct meaningful stories in the present.
