CULANTH 308: BorderWork(s): At Home/On the Wall : Primary Sources

Image courtesy Cardinal Stritch University Library

Primary sources are contemporary, first-hand, (un)published accounts of an event. Published = printed, filmed, uploaded, or digitized (non-archival) materials. How to Read a Primary Source (Bowdoin College) includes a helpful section with questions to ask when evaluating a primary source.

Archival Collections

• Rubinstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library
• University Archives
• Duke Human Rights Archive
  

Newspapers

• International newspapers--Links to and descriptions of (nearly) all of the Duke Library's newspapers - original, electronic & microform, as well as links to collections available to members of the Duke community, but located outside of Duke itself.
  
• Conducting Research Using Newspapers

Primary Source Publications

Publications of original documents, often with retrospective scholarly analysis and bibliographies. 

• Letters and correspondence
• Diaries and personal narratives
• Interviews
• Government documents (e.g. US State Dept. reports on Countries and Human Rights; UN Human Development Reports)
• Laws & Legislation 
• Literature in English(eg. critical editions of fiction and poetry)

Audiovisual Materials

• Still Images: Embedded Collections (image searching in journal databases, eg. AP Images, ARTstor, Cinema Image Gallert frin Wilson web), portals (Collections of Image Sites from Trustworthy Sources -- The Interntational and Area Studies Librarians at Duke maintain excellent image portals in the research guides for their respective areas); and commercial collections (ORBIS, charge for use, but browsing is free)
• Moving Images (Video/Films)
• Sound-recordings – such as oral histories, political speeches = eg. Search by format ("Audio") for keyword (eg. "human rights")

Numerical & Geospatial Data

• Maps and geographic information systems (GIS)
• Non-spatial data sets – indices do not take into account any spatial relationships of the geographical entities (i.e., distances apart, clustering within, spatial concentrations, etc.).
• Using Statistics (Purdue): Numbers don't speak for themselves. Here's advice on how to use statistics effectively.

Primary Source Databases

• Primary Sources Research databases

Image courtesy Cardinal Stritch University Library

Secondary Sources are retrospective analyses based on the author's own reading of existing primary sources. Scholarly work uses recent, peer-reviewed academic sources, such as journal (not magazine) articles, books, and book chapters. What is a scholarly or peer reviewed article? View NCSU Library's 5-minute tutorial: Peer Review in Five Minutes

Books

• Reference books (subject-specific encyclopedias and dictionaries like The Encylopedia of Human Rights, or A Dictionary of Globalization) give you a helpful overview of your topic, provide authoritative definitions of terms, theoretical concepts and historical events, and a bibliography. 
• Published research: scientific studies and monographs, containing scholarly analysis and apparatus (i.e., footnotes and bibliography) that provides additional resources and substantiates the author's research.
• Books at other libraries (TRLN, WorldCat)  
• Book locations in Perkins/Bostock Library and professional school libraries
• View a 1 min. tutorial on requesting books that are checked-out or in off-site storage

Articles

• View a 1-minute tutorial on choosing an article database (e.g. Academic Search Premier, JSTOR, Index Islamicus, AnthroSource, SocIndex)
• View a 2 min. tutorial on using the "get it at Duke" button to find full-text articles 
• View a 2 min. tutorial on creating a Document Delivery account
• Placing requests through Document Delivery Services

Dissertations & theses

• Find dissertations/theses

Book Reviews

• Find book reviews