Is this Primary?! Is this Secondary?!
Look through these two tutorials to help you figure it out!
Use these terms as keywords, alongside keywords or subject headings related to your topic, to search for primary sources related to your topic. Try to think about in what format the information might have been recorded in during that Historical Time Period.
One method for finding books that may be considered primary sources is to search PRIMO using keywords that describe your topic in combination with the following terms:
Example: personal narratives AND "south africa" (see image below for other example)
There are many primary source collections freely available online.
Try searching on national library websites of countries you are researching, or do a very broad search on your topic in combination with words/phrases like "digital archive" or "primary sources" or "digitized" or "digital collection."
For example:
jane addams digital collection
france national library digitized
At Hope Libraries, we subscribe to several full text databases of published primary sources. They are searchable by keyword, so you can do very precise searches on your topic in newspapers, magazines and journals. Because these databases are so large t is helpful to narrow by date range to the time period in which you are interested.