Where do you find primary sources?

Once you know the types of primary sources you'll need based on your research topic, there are two strategies that can help you find them: citation mining and deep web searching. If you start your research by finding background information from secondary sources, you can use citation mining to compile a list of primary sources that others have used. I'm researching educational initiatives that were started as a part of the Civil Rights movement.

I found this article from the Fall 2014 issue of Southern Quarterly. Right in the first paragraph, I see a reference to a primary source: an article written by Howard Zinn about his own experiences teaching in a freedom school. By reviewing this article's list of works cited, I can begin to pull out primary sources that might be useful for my own research.

I see that some of these resources are available online, while others I will have to track down using library resources. Sometimes, though, I might want to look for primary sources that others didn't use. In order to do so, I will have to use deep web searching.

Primary sources are often held in digital collections, library catalogs, or proprietary databases. Search engines can find these big collections but they can't get to the items inside. To find the primary sources you need, you will first have to find the collections in which they live.

In a general search engine, like Google, try searching for your broad topic, the type of material you're looking for, and a designator. For example, I want to search for news footage about integration efforts from the Civil Rights era. In Google, I will try searching for my broad topic (civil rights), the type of material I want (which is video), and the type of collection I'm looking for (which is a digital collection).

My first few search results have returned what look like some very good resources, including UWM's March on Milwaukee digital collection. Within an individual resource, I can conduct a more detailed search, limiting my results to video and searching for a particular keyword: integration. UWM Libraries have a lot of other digital collections, in addition to the award-winning March on Milwaukee collection.

These may be a good starting point for your primary source research. The Library of Congress digital collections are another good place to find digitized primary sources. You can find physical primary sources from the Wisconsin Historical Society and UWM Libraries' Archives and Special Collections through Search@UW.

These resources can be used within the library. You can also use ArchiveGrid to find other archival collections near a particular location.