InfoGuides: Museum Studies: Primary Sources

Last Updated: Nov 12, 2024 9:29 AM

What is a primary source?

Primary sources are items that were created during the time period being studied.^* These documents provide firsthand accounts or original information surrounding an event.^† Diaries and letters of correspondence are examples of primary sources. Newspapers can also be primary sources if the articles were written at the time an event occurred (e.g. an article on Prohibition published in 1925).

Primary Sources - Infoguide
See this guide for even more information about finding, using, and citing primary sources.

Databases with primary sources

Mass Observation Online This link opens in a new window
Mass Observation Online, which is focused on everyday life in Britain, provides access to original manuscript and typescript papers created and collected by the Mass Observation organization (1937 to early 1950s), as well as printed publications, photographs and interactive features.
Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 This link opens in a new window
Women and Social Movements in the United States brings together books, images, documents, scholarly essays, commentaries, and bibliographies, documenting the multiplicity of women's activism in public life. Thousands of pages of materials provide scholars with in-depth access to the published histories and records of women's reform organizations throughout the United States during the 19th and early 20th centuries.

ARTstor
Artstor includes over 2 million images covering art, architecture, archaeology, and photography; all available for use in research and teaching. Images come with high-quality metadata from collection catalogers, curators, institutions, and artists themselves. Please note: As of August 1, 2024, Artstor's content, key resources, and functionality will be available on JSTOR. The stand-alone Artstor website will be retired. Most Artstor content is already available on JSTOR and can be accessed via https://ezproxy.rit.edu/login?url=https://www.jstor.org/images. DONATED: From the C. B. Neblette Collection on Photography and Reprography and a gift from Harold R. and Marian Condit.
New York Times (1851-present)
Full-text coverage of the US newspaper of record. Offers superb coverage of national and international news, plus coverage of important speeches and documents, Supreme Court decisions, and presidential press conference transcripts.

Library of Congress--Digital Collections
The LoC offers a large selection of topic based digital collections which offer digital scans of photographs, manuscripts, artwork, maps, correspondence, and more.

Special Digital Collection: Piracy Trials

NYS Historic Newspapers
The NYS Historic Newspapers project provides free online access to a wide range of newspapers chosen to reflect New York's unique history. To search the entire collection, use the Search Tab. Or, click on a county to search or browse geographically.
This collection contains 1,375,872 issues comprising 13,834,364 pages.
ProQuest Historical Newspapers -- U.S. Northeast Collection

This collection covers 19 northeast regional newspapers.

ProQuest Historical Newspapers: The New York Times with Index
This historical newspaper provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time. The Historical New York Times with Index (1851-1993) provides search capability using subject terms and topics for focused and targeted results in combination with searchable full text, full page, and article-level images from the Historical New York Times.
Proquest Complete
All-in-one database that provides coverage for nearly all academic areas of study including arts, business, humanities, health, social sciences, sciences and current affairs. Basic Search Demo and Advanced Search Demo. The advanced video is from 2015 but the concepts still apply.

Summon
A discovery tool for searching across 98% of RIT Libraries collections. Refine your search results by choosing a document type for obtaining primary sources, i.e., archival material, government document, image, manuscript, etc.