Online Resources for Primary Sources
The following online resources are primarily from the U.S. government. They provide extensive
collections of primary source material with multiple media types.
U.S. Government Sources
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American Memory: http://memory.loc.gov
National Archives and Records Administration (NARA):http://www.archives.gov
Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov
US Patent and Trademark Office:http://www.uspto.gov/patft/
Smithsonian Images Collection:http://siarchives.si.edu/collections
NASA: http://www.nasa.gov/ and http://science.nasa.gov/
U.S. Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov/
Other Sources
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Internet Archive: http://www.archive.org/
Footnote: http://www.footnote.com/
Digital History: http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/
Eyewitness to History:http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/
Repositories of Primary Sources:http://webpages.uidaho.edu/specialcollections/other.repositories.html
Educator Kathy Schrock has shared a collection of online resources for primary sources on her
website. This collection accompanies her presentation entitled “A Three Hour Tour: Navigating
Primary Source Material on the Internet.” View the slides as a PDF or as a Picasa Web Album.
Search Techniques
Techniques for effective searching can be used on numerous sites. Search skills are generally transferable
and will help you find the results you want faster on any site, even though every site has its own particular
quirks.
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Keyword Refinement
Exact Phrases
Boolean Search
Wildcards
Teaching your students these search skills can help them with online research in all areas, not just for
primary sources.
Keyword Refinement
Searching for a single word, or even a very common phrase, will often return many more results than you
want. Adding additional keywords can help refine your search, focusing on just the resources you want. It
might take several tries to get the right search, but it’s often more efficient to spend time refining your
search than to spend time wading through dozens of unrelated resources.
Here’s an example of how this process works:
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First, you search on American Memory for science. That gives you 5000 results—it would take
hours to browse through that many resources.
Next, you try searching with two keywords: science environment. That limits the search to only 81
results—a much more manageable number. You wonder if you could get more specific though.
Searching for science environment conservation returns only 6 results. Now you can quickly
review all the resources to see if they meet your needs. If they don’t, you can try again using
another set of keywords.
If you’re searching on a general search engine like Google rather than an online resource like American
Memory, you may improve your results by adding keyword phrases like primary source, original
document, or manuscript to your search. Adding the phrase “public domain” to a search can help you find
materials that are freely available without worrying about fair use restrictions.
Exact Phrases
Most search engines and primary source resources allow you to search for exact phrases by enclosing the
search terms in quotes. If you enter the words peanut butter as your search terms, you will find sources
about “peanut butter,” but you’ll also find sources about peanuts (the nuts) and butter (the dairy product). If
you just want results about peanut butter, search for “peanut butter” (with quotes) instead.
Boolean Search
Some search engines and archives rely on Boolean search for advanced searching. Usually you can still
enter a few keywords and eventually find what you need, even if you don’t use Boolean search. However, it
can be more efficient to use the full power of the search.
Boolean search uses words like AND, OR, and NOT to refine searches.
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airplane AND invention would return results that have both the words airplane and invention in
them, but not necessarily together as an exact phrase.
airplane OR invention would provide results that have either the word airplane or the word
invention, but not both together.
airplane NOT invention would return results containing the word airplane, excluding anything that
contained invention.
Wild Cards
What if you’re searching for a word with multiple forms (e.g., invent, invented, inventing, invention)?
Some search engines, like Google, will often find these related forms automatically. However, for some
resources you may need to use what’s known as a wildcard. A wildcard tells the search that you want
anything in place of that wildcard. Usually it’s an asterisk (*), but check the guidelines on specific sites to
see whether it’s allowed or not.
On a site that allows wildcard searching, tele* would return results including all these terms:
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telephone
telegraph
telegram
television
American Memory Specifics
The American Memory site has some special features of which you should be aware. First, the special
collections allow you to browse by different criteria without doing an actual search. You can browse by:
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Topic
Time Period
Media Type
Place
Second, because of the way American Memory creates temporary pages based on searches, you can’t
bookmark the pages you view from a search. If you bookmark these temporary pages, they won’t work
when you return later. Therefore, you should follow the specific instructions for finding the permanent
address for primary sources before bookmarking them.
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Text directions: http://memory.loc.gov/learn/start/tech/link.html
Assignment: Search in the Library of Congress resources to find two additional resources you believe
you could use in your Privacy Paper & Presentation. Create an annotated bibliography for these two
sources. Submit this assignment to Blackboard before 7:30 Friday November 7. 25 Points.