Introduction to the Types of Primary Sources and Archives

What are primary sources?

In general, primary sources can be considered the "raw materials" of research in the same way that iron ore, coke, limestone, iron scrap, and alloying materials are the raw materials to make steel.

But different fields have different ideas about just what this means. When researching in most fields, primary sources are: original, unpublished, first-hand records of an event (for example, a diary of someone who lived in the period you're researching or the accounting records of a particular company being studied).

When researching in literature, film, cultural studies and some related disciplines, primary sources include all of the kinds of sources above, and also the literary text, film, song, or painting you plan to develop an argument about.

What aren't primary sources?

Whatever your field, primary sources are not critical, analytical, interpretive responses to the events or texts being studied. Instead, such responses (which are typically created after an event) are considered secondary sources.

Secondary sources can include: textbooks, encyclopedias, summaries, professors' lectures, etc.

What are archives?

The word archives typically refers to a collection of primary sources or the place where such primary sources are housed and accessed.

Although not usually based on the same methods of selecting and providing access to material as the more formal use of the term, the word archives is also frequently used to refer to any collection of (usually textual) material retained for future use. For example, a researcher might refer to their own collection of current news articles and images on a research topic an archives, a university might refer to a set of articles written by its faculty and stored and provided online as an archives, or an individual might say they are "archiving" when they move older computer files no longer in regular use to a special file on a cd-rom.

What are other places to find primary source material?

As well as being housed in archives themselves, archival materials can be housed in manuscript repositories, historical societies, and sometimes even in library special collections or rare books rooms. As well as such free-standing archives, many individual organizations and businesses have have institutional archives or in-house archives (for example, The Kautz Family YMCA Archives, The Anglican Diocese of Huron, and the JPMorgan Chase Archives.