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.
Example: personal narratives AND "south africa" (see image below for other example)
Primary sources include a variety of materials written or created during the time period of the topic you are researching.
Primary Sources Online: Finding, Evaluating, and Using from the American Library Association
Library collections include primary sources in a variety of formats. Most of those in the Hope College Libraries are in book form. In some cases, the content of the book has been transferred to microfiche or a special type of microfiche known as ultrafiche.
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:
Remember that you may need to think about your topic broadly to find primary sources using this method. After actually looking at the source you will know whether or not it effectively addresses your specific topic.
For additional assistance locating and using primary source materials, please consult the Van Wylen Library Reference Desk.
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.
Content/Description: Includes digitized content from newspaper publications collected by the Hoover Institution and now housed at Stanford Libraries. Collections Included: El Mundo Digital Archive, Imperial Russian Newspapers, Independent and Revolutionary Mexican Newspapers, Late Qing and Republican-Era Chinese Newspapers, Middle Eastern and North African Newspapers, South Asian Newspapers, Southeast Asian Newspapers