Slides from a presentation at Lancaster University History department's Undergraduate Dissertation Conference 2016.

1. Primary sources
from Lancaster University Library and beyond
Tim Leonard, Academic Liaison Librarian
t.leonard@lancaster.ac.uk / @TimJPLeonard

2. “Primary sources are items that are directly
associated with their producer or user and the
time period in which they were created”
Presnall, Jenny (2007) The Information Literate Historian, p. 93

3. What’s challenging about
doing primary research?
Attendees in the session said
 Problems of language
 Overwhelming amount of
information
 Often difficult to understand
 Where to start???

4. Some ideas…
 Might be unique
 Might not be available online
 Might only be available in a particular
location
 Might not be discoverable online
 Might be in a challenging format

5. “as we know, there are known knowns; there
are things we know we know. We also know
there are known unknowns; that is to say we
know there are some things we do not know.
But there are also unknown unknowns – the
ones we don't know we don't know”

6. Locating primary sources: a
methodology
• Who would have produced these resources?
• Who would have used or critiqued them?
• When would these primary sources have been
produced?
• Would they have been published, unpublished or
represented in another form?
• What would historians of that period have used to do
their research?
• Why does/would this resource still exist? Why was it
important enough for someone to preserve?
Presnall, Jenny (2007) The Information Literate Historian, p. 96-97

7. Archives
Historical societies
Museums
Universities
Libraries
Experts

8. www.lancaster.ac.uk/library

9. History Subject Guide
 Journal
databases
 Ebook
collections
 Databases for
primary sources
 Online archives
and more

10. Gale Artemis
Searches across:
 17th and 18th Century
Burney Collection
 19th Century British
Newspapers and
Periodicals
 18th Century
Collections Online
 FT and Times Archives

11. British History Online
• Primary
resources from
1300-1800
• Huge collection
of scanned digital
content

12. Archives Hub
 Information on over
280 archives across
the country
 Core content
information
 Sometimes includes
sections within a
collection, links to
catalogues, etc

13. National Archives Discovery
• 32 million
records
• 9 million
documents
available for
download
• Find an archive
by region very
useful to find
local archive
sources

14. Lancaster University Special
Collections
www.lancaster.ac.uk/library/resources/special-collections/

15. One to one support available!
Get in touch: in person or via
academicliaison@lancaster.ac.uk

16. Thanks and good luck in your dissertation!
Image credits:
Writing Hand by Dawn Hudson is licensed under CC0 1.0
Utter relief by Theen Moy is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
Donald Rumsfeld answers questions from the media by U.S. Navy photo
[Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
Arrows by Stefano Pedretti is licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0
Light Bulb by To Uyen from The Noun Project
Like by John Caserta from The Noun Project