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Kreitzberg Library for CGCS Students

Library Research Lesson: Finding Primary Source Materials

This lesson looks at what primary sources are, their value to the historian, and discusses different methods of locating them.

Searching the Library's Book Collection

In this example, I'm going to use the library's catalog to search for diaries from World War II.

  • Remember to put "World War II" in quotes to search it as a phrase.
  • As you can see, we get 83 results for items available through the Kreitzberg Library.
  • You can narrow your results by format from the options in the menu on the left.
  • Click the Access online button to access eBooks.
  • Print books that are available through the library can be requested.

Finding primary source materials through the online Kreitzberg Library

Reviewing a Book Record in Library Catalog

I choose one book available through the library in physical copy, which is Captured on Corregidor: Diary of an American P.O.W. in World War II. This seems like a good example of a primary source at first glance but remember to evaluate it thoroughly.

  • I can try to find other materials similar to these but looking at the Subjects listed under the Description section. For example, I could click on the Prisoners of war Philippines Diaries link to find other diaries from prisoners of war in the Phillippines.

Looking at subject headings under Description

Historical & Current Newspapers

Primary Sources in Library Databases

There a number of primary source digital collections. These are databases entirely of primary source materials. Each presents a variety of resources including documents, narratives, memoirs, pamphlets, court records, and more.

Your Norwich username and password are required for access.
https://guides.norwich.edu/online/primarysourceslrl/library
guides.norwich.edu
crawl=CC-MAIN-2020-45
79774
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:ZRMLJKDXM74DAFZBNMCB4AWXT3RDN277
<urn:uuid:de48704a-388e-4a43-b3ec-bf4866a347bb>
2020-10-24T10:04:46Z
3.86.37.148
text/html
sha1:JSFDUQ2IZLCNJAOKY2QDXZRIOXVYHMYD
<urn:uuid:7214fb63-f551-49ad-a6e1-a4b767190470>
https://guides.norwich.edu/online/primarysourceslrl/library
response
<urn:uuid:8dc00fca-09f6-4b2c-bf4c-c001c78fc249>
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2020-45
publisher: Common Crawl
description: Wide crawl of the web for October 2020
operator: Common Crawl Admin (info@commoncrawl.org)
hostname: ip-10-67-67-244.ec2.internal
software: Apache Nutch 1.17 (modified, https://github.com/commoncrawl/nutch/)
robots: checked via crawler-commons 1.2-SNAPSHOT (https://github.com/crawler-commons/crawler-commons)
format: WARC File Format 1.1
conformsTo: http://iipc.github.io/warc-specifications/specifications/warc-format/warc-1.1/