Finding Primary Sources Online

Before the recent “digital revolution,” scarcity of information was often one of the biggest challenges faced by historians. This is still the case for the study of some historical topics: some areas of human experience in the past were simply not documented by enough sources, or not enough of those sources have survived, to tell historians everything they would like to know. However, for many periods and topics in history, the problem is the opposite – there is too much information available. The difficulty now is to navigate the huge glut of primary source materials made accessible by the digital replication and distribution of source materials. 

  • Don’t reinvent the wheel! Your instructor or your librarian may have provided you with a curated list of places to begin your search. Start there. 
  • Check with a librarian to see if your library provides lists of resources for historical research.
  • Even if you’re entirely on your own, it’s relatively easy to find specialized guides to historical primary sources by searching the web. Search with a phrase that describes your topic along with libguide or research guide. For example, here are two research guides for primary sources from World War I:

There are a number of sites that list primary source collections by geographic region or topic. Here are a few that are particularly extensive and recently updated as of this writing: 

Search Smarter

Computers don’t think the way people do. When we come across a word or phrase in a language we know, our minds call forth a rich array of ideas, events, feelings, and meanings. These associations with the word or phrase are directly tied to our personal and educational experiences.

When we approach an online search, we often expect that the computer shares those rich associations and will automatically know that, when we search for X, we’ll also be interested in Y and Z.

So, for instance, if I come across just the two-word phrase “civil rights,” I will automatically think of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, the Woolworth’s lunch counter sit-in, the Freedom Riders, race riots in multiple American cities, and many other events and people. 

When I sit down in front of a computer and search for “civil rights,” I may also assume that the computer knows I’m interested in finding out about all these other things as well, and the search results I receive should reflect this.

But in fact, the computer you use to search doesn’t know that all these things are connected - or if it does, a human being had to teach it how to connect them. Instead of calling forth a rich array of meanings and associations, the sequence of characters you enter in a search box - known in computer science lingo as a search string - remains just that for a computer: a sequence of characters.

When you enter “civil rights”, the computer doesn’t think of Rosa Parks: it just sees the twelve characters that make up the phrase (including the space), and nothing else. It goes off to hunt those twelve characters down wherever they appear, and then delivers results, none of which may have anything to do with Rosa Parks. Google can search millions of Internet pages in the blink of an eye, but it (still!) can’t do what your mind does - connect information to other relevant information, without mediation.

In practical terms, this means that even before you begin an online search for primary sources, you should take a moment to make conscious and explicit the whole rich network of ideas behind your topic by generating lists of relevant keywords. This can be as simple as picking up pencil and paper and brainstorming a dozen words or phrases, or it can be as ambitious as creating a flowchart showing conceptual or practical relationships between different areas of your topic.

However you go about it, you should use this keyword list as the basis for multiple strategic searches, casting your net more widely than you would with your original phrase by drawing on a wider range of connected ideas. In essence, you’re getting the computer to think a little more intelligently - a little more like you.

Taking a few moments to generate this list, and putting in the time to work with it, will almost certainly result in more productive and more rewarding online search experiences and will help you write better history. Here are a few more tips:

  1. When you don’t have a specific primary source in mind, search your library catalog or the internet with a phrase describing the topic that interests you plus the phrase primary sources. For example: search world war I soldiers primary sources.
  2. While reading secondary sources, you will often come across citations of primary source material that interests you. Identify a specific primary source title from your reading, and search Google with that title enclosed in quotes. Enclosing a phrase in quotes tells Google to treat everything between the quotes as a single search term. For example: “A soldier recalls the Trail of Tears”.
  3. To search for a famous primary source – for instance, the Declaration of Independence – include quotation marks around its standard title and add the word text or transcript. For example: “Declaration of Independence” text.

Finding Images on the Internet

When you want to use an image as a historical primary source in your work, it’s extremely important that you maintain careful notes of all the pertinent information about the image that interests you - who created it, as well as when, where, and why it was created, where you found it, how and where it is preserved, and what permission you have to reproduce it in your work.

This not only deepens and clarifies the historical context of your primary source as you interpret it for your reader, but also allows you to cite the primary source accurately and completely, which is important for other researchers who read your work and may want to refer to that source themselves.

If you found a primary source image on a site that offers all this information - called metadata - on the same page as the image, you should make sure that either (a) the version of the image you downloaded includes the metadata in some format, often (but not always) in a cover sheet that forms part of the same file; or (b) you keep careful notes in a text file of all metadata associated with the image, and preserve this file alongside the image.

Downloading images is now so fast and simple that it’s easy to skip this step. Nonetheless, keeping good records of the metadata associated with your primary sources is not just busy work: it’s solid historiographical practice, and it may save you hours at crunch time when you suddenly discover you don’t have any information about a primary source that is crucial to your argument.

Here are some excellent places to search for historical primary source images:

Using Images Legally

Many people still assume that any content they discover on the Internet is fair game for reuse and that copyright does not apply to digital artifacts. This assumption is nearly always untrue. Alongside questions of historical authenticity and reliability, students and scholars of history need to pay particular attention to questions of copyright when they want to reproduce all or part of a historical primary source in their own work.

This is especially true in the use of images, which are very easy to locate, download, and manipulate. Although you may have found a great historical primary source image online and you may have all the necessary information to cite it correctly in your paper, that does not mean you have the legal right to reproduce it within your own work.

You may be tempted to shrug off these complicated questions, post your work to the Internet, and include the image anyway, assuming that the Internet is such a big and complicated place that the copyright owner will never turn up to demand you take down your work. Then, suddenly, the copyright owner comes knocking, and you find out the hard way that you were wrong.

Using images in the context of academic coursework is usually considered fair use, but this is a much narrower and more complex category than most people assume. If you reproduce an image that doesn’t belong to you in an online location where others can access it - e.g. a non-password-protected class website or a published paper or book - or use it in a performance or exhibit outside the classroom, you should consider possible copyright restrictions and ask your course instructor or librarian for guidance.

If the license for your image allows your use of it on the Internet or outside the classroom, be sure to follow applicable best practices for attribution, including most importantly three-point attribution. If your work refers to the image without reproducing it, simply follow the citation format dictated by your instructor, using the metadata you’ve recorded for the image. For help with citation, see Using Primary Sources in Your Writing.

Public Domain and Creative Commons Licenses

Images in the public domain are ones that can be used by anyone for any purpose: no one owns the copyright in these works. Determining whether an item is in the public domain can, however, be challenging - even sometimes for experts. In general, works published or registered in the United States more than one hundred years ago, along with all material produced at any time by the US federal government, are considered to be in the public domain.

For more information on the public domain see:

When you’re working with historical primary source images that derive from a particular site, always make sure you read the section of the site that describes copyright and permissions for further use, and always pay attention to the license or any copyright restrictions noted in the metadata for an individual image. This information should allow you to determine whether an image is in the public domain, can be used with attribution, or requires written permission from the copyright owner for further use. Many images and other digital objects are now covered under Creative Commons licensing, which lays out clear constraints on use.

Here are some additional places you might try searching for public domain images, as well as other images you might be able to use under some conditions:

Next: Evaluating Primary Sources Online