Skip to Main Content
     

ENGL 336: The Eighteenth-Century Novel

What is a Primary Source?

Primary Sources are firsthand accounts of an event -- or original records created during that time period -- which do not contain any outside interpretation. Primary sources can include letters, diaries, or interviews; historical news reportage; original works of fiction, art, or music; testimony or speeches. Primary sources enable the researcher to get as close as possible to what actually happened during an historical event or time period. 

Conducting Primary Source Research

Conducting Primary Source Research

When looking for primary historical sources to compliment your research, it can be difficult to know where to start. Although there are similarities to searching for critical secondary sources - using keywords in a database for example - your mindset and methods need to be quite different. 

Keyword Brainstorming for Primary sources

When thinking of keywords to find historical documents, you need to anticipate what words might have been used in the era that you are searching for resources in. For example, if you're wanting to find examples of essays on conduct for gentlemen and women in the 17th century, you need to think about what words may have been used in that kind of literature. Here is a list of keywords you might use for that kind of search:

Gentlewoman, gentlemen, nobility, gentry, modesty, virtues, manners, conduct, compliments, morality, piety.

Combine these terms and others you might think of related to preferred 18th century conduct in ECCO and see what kinds of results you get.

Assessing Primary Texts for Usability

Another way consulting primary sources can be different from secondary source research is that there are often not a lot of context clues for what a search result might actually contain. There are no abstracts or journal titles to help give you an idea of what the source is about, and often the titles are not even good indicators of the content matter. To continue the conduct literature example, a treatise containing the type of work you want to use in your paper might be titled "Thoughts and collected essays of a gentlemen upon his retirement." Not very helpful, is it? With primary sources, you need to go into the materials themselves to really discover if they will be useful to you. Below are some tricks for delving deeper into primary sources:

  • Use subject and date filters! in ECCO and NECCO there are many different subject filters you can use to narrow down your results by genre. These can be incredibly helpful if you're looking for essays or treatises but keep getting english theater reviews!
  • Search for key terms within the source itself. ECCO and NECCO have the search function available within almost every source they contain. use this to find the appropriate content for your needs.
  • HAVE PATIENCE. Finding primary source content that works for your needs is a non-linear and slow process. Take deep breaths, devote some time to it, and remember to make an appointment with a librarian if you need help!