Historians distinguish between primary vs. secondary sources.
"Secondary" is fairly straightforward to define: what historians write about past phenomena. The best known examples are books and journal articles. Other formats can include papers in edited volumes, chapters, dissertations, and more. Secondary source material interprets or describes the primary source material and draws conclusions about the events reported and can illustrate how our understanding has changed over time, or provide the necessary social or cultural context.
"Primary" sources however take many forms--correspondence, diaries, personal narratives, photographs, official public records, news reports, advertisements... Primary sources are usually contemporary with the past phenomena under study. Primary sources are put into context by means of secondary sources.
It is important to remember that primary sources may be reproduced and published much later. Even if you are looking at a copy, it is still a primary source.
Try Primo, our discovery interface - where you can locate physical resources, directly access electronic resources, and place requests across our collections.
Mind the scopes - scopes are searchable domains...the default scope is to search everything, books, articles and more. "everything" combines the library catalog (mostly books) and e-resources (mostly articles).
Search Tip: Peer-reviewed journals may also contain items that are not peer reviewed, such as letters to the editor, opinion pieces, and book reviews. Even if you check the peer review limiter box, you still need to examine the items carefully to be sure they are scholarly articles.
The Journals Search lists what journals and newspapers the library has access to. If you have found a citation and want to see if you can get to the full-text, use this type of search to look for the journal title.
Here are a couple of tips:
If you don't know what journal titles to search for, look at the journal titles that came up in your Primo search. In the case below, I might want to search in Journal of Colonialism & Colonial History for other articles on the same topic.
You can also mine the class readings for other journal titles.
You can use multi-disciplinary databases such as ProQuest Central and EBSCOhost's Academic Search Premier
Selected Databases: Use the Browse Databases A-Z or Primo (discovers what you won't find in Google. It searches across many subscription databases and the library catalog simultaneously.)
If using EBSCOhost - select the Choose Databases link at the top if the screen and select multiple subject databases that are relevant to your topic.