Primary sources are first-hand accounts, original manuscripts, or records or documents produced at the time of the event. Letters, photographs, speeches, interviews, government documents, historical records, and personal papers are some examples of primary sources. These may be available in their original form, or they may be reproduced in another book or microform collection.
The Library has a variety of reproduced primary source documents in both print and microform. Many microform documents are listed below in the Library Research and Resource Guides section. To locate additional reproductions of primary source materials that we own, regardless of format, search the UT Library Catalog.The catalog can locate specific primary source titles such as the New York Times or The Diary of Anne Frank. Often, however, you do not have a specific title, but are looking for something by a particular person or on a particular topic.
An author search is an effective way to locate the letters, papers or diaries of individuals. To perform an author search, type in the persons last name, then first name and press enter. For example, if you search Jefferson, Thomas you will find 62 items some of which are titled the "The letters of..." or "The papers of...".
You will often see subject headings toward the bottom of the the UT Library Catalog record, such as Jefferson, Thomas, 1743-1826 -- Manuscripts or Presidents -- United States -- Correspondence that can be searched for more primary sources related to the topic.
A good way to locate primary documents pertaining to events or places is to perform a keywords search. This allows you to combine topics with terms like narratives, diaries, correspondence, interviews, records, newspapers, sources, papers and manuscripts, which indicate primary sources. For example, the keyword search Holocaust and narratives, produces many titles that provide firsthand accounts, while Charleston and newspapers produces 7 newspapers published during the Colonial era. As with the author searches above, you may use the subject headings that appear on the screen to find similar documents.
Add terms like indexes, bibliography and catalogs to your keyword searches to locate finding aids available. They are particularly important in using the microform collections. For example, the keyword search, British colonial records indexes, will identify A Guide to British Public Record Office, Colonial Office, Class 5 Files, an index to a 53 reel collection (Records of the British Colonial Office, Class 5) available in the Microform & Multimedia.
Note the LOCATION heading on the screen for each title. It indicates the item's specific library collection and related location- General Collection, Reference Collection, Microform & Multimedia or Federal Documents. Click on the name of the LOCATION for more information.
The Ward M. Canaday Center, located on the fifth floor of Carlson Library, is a repository of original primary source documents. It serves as the University's archives and has valuable manuscript and rare book collections. The Canaday Center's mission is to support the curriculum of The University of Toledo. The emphasis for collecting is placed on acquiring 20th century materials, mainly because of the availability of these materials. As with the reproduced primary sources, the Canaday Center's manuscript and rare book collections are cataloged in the UT Library Catalog. Please see Finding Manuscripts and Archival Materials for more information about searching for these materials.
These guides will lead you to a wide variety of primary resources available at Carlson Library.
This is a selected list of links to Web sites containing primary source documents for history research. It is the Web's ability to provide digital access to a wide variety of documents that would otherwise be difficult to come by that makes it such a valuable tool history researchers.