Finding Primary Sources

This page lists a variety of kinds of sources and offers links to resources for exploring them.

Searching in HOLLIS

To find books, periodicals, manuscripts, videos, etc., on a topic in HOLLIS, put in likely keywords and choose Library Catalog. Look at pertinent records and find the terms under Subject. For example, searching suburban "Los Angeles" yields:

Popular culture in the age of white flight : fear and fantasy in suburban Los Angeles, by Eric Avila. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, 308 pages
Subjects:
Popular culture -- California -- Los Angeles -- History -- 20th century.
Public spaces -- California -- Los Angeles -- History -- 20th century.
Whites -- Race identity -- California -- Los Angeles.
Suburban life -- California -- Los Angeles -- History -- 20th century.
Suburban life in popular culture -- California -- Los Angeles -- History -- 20th century.
Migration, Internal -- History -- 20th century.
African Americans -- California -- Los Angeles -- Social conditions -- 20th century.
City and town life -- California -- Los Angeles -- History -- 20th century.
Los Angeles (Calif.) -- Civilization -- 20th century.
Los Angeles (Calif.) -- Social conditions -- 20th century.
Los Angeles (Calif.) -- Race relations.
HOLLIS Record

Under Refine my results: Subject on the right of the results list there are more main terms (Suburbs; Sociology, urban; Urban policy) to try, but not the terms after the dashes (Social conditions) which are called subdivisions. If you hit one of the terms in this Subject list, HOLLIS will find records with the term, say Urban policy​, only on records in the set originally formed by searching suburban Los Angeles.

Redo your search using the terms that HOLLIS uses. Also, go to Starts with.../Browse (top black band) and put in Los Angeles (Calif.), adjusting to Browse by Subject. This is very useful in breaking down a large subject and in giving you more subdivisions, which can be applied to other Subject terms, to search. Thus:

  • Whites -- Race identity
  • Hispanic Americans -- Race identity

Birmingham and (Alabama or Ala).  The full state name and the abbreviation are both used in different Subject terms.  A list of the proper abbreviations is available.

Whenever you have a reference to a useful book, look it up in HOLLIS and see what the Subject terms are.

Any pertinent book published during your era may be a primary source, but certain kinds of primary sources, including originally unpublished sources such as letters and diaries published later, have particular terms attached to their Subject terms in a HOLLIS record. Change Any field to Subject for cleanest results.

  • --Archives
  • --Correspondence
  • --Description and travel
  • --Diaries
  • --Manuscripts
  • --Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.
  • --Personal narratives (refers to accounts of wars and diseases only)
  • --Sources (usually refers to collections of published primary sources)

When you find a pertinent book, go to Starts With.../Browse and put in the call number, adjusting the menu to Library of Congress (Wid-LC) or Other. This shows you other books on the same subject, even though they may be in storage or checked out.

Pamphlets, short printed booklets, often concern a local time and place.  Search in the vast Loeb Design Library pamphlet collection (roughly 1930s-2008) with HOLLIS Library Catalog Advanced Search searches of the form:

Code: Library + Collection: desvf
AND
Your search term

These searches can be limited by language, dates, format, etc. In the usual way

Searching within All English-language Works Published in a Country or state

You can do a HOLLIS search for material published in a particular country or US state.  Go to HOLLIS Advanced search, adjust menu to Code: MARC Place of pub and put, for example for Massachusetts, mau in the search box.

In HOLLIS Library Catalog Advanced Search do searches of the form:

Keyword anywhere exact phrase: Economic conditions
AND
Code: MARC place of publication: ohu    [Code: MARC place of publication is toward the bottom of the search menu: Ohio]

See the Library Research Guide for History and the HOLLIS Help guide for more information on searching HOLLIS.

WorldCat

For material not available at Harvard, search in: WorldCat (the OCLC Union Catalog) which includes catalog records from over 70,000 libraries worldwide but largely U.S. Includes books, periodicals, archives and manuscripts, maps, videotapes, computer readable files, etc. Includes Boston-area libraries.

Importance of WorldCat:

  • 1. Subject searching beyond Harvard. For periodicals: Advanced search. Document type-Serial Publications
  • 2. Clues for finding items in the HOLLIS Catalog, e.g., volumes in monograph series for which HOLLIS has only one record for the whole series.
  • 3. Finding non-Harvard books in Boston-area libraries.
  • 4. Verifying references for InterLibrary Loan. Give them the Accession no. at the bottom of the record (i.e., OCLC number) to speed up the request.

You can do a WorldCat search for material published in a particular country or US state.  In WorldCat Advanced Search. Put cp:massachusetts in the 'Search for:' Keyword field. Cp: is country/state of publication.

It's easier to find free online material in WorldCat.org

 Searching in HathiTrust & Other Digital Libraries and Collections

 

HathiTrust Digital Library includes a searchable database of digitized books and periodicals contributed by numerous libraries. Includes items contributed by these libraries to Google Books and to Internet Archive but with some unique material. Each full text item is linked to a standard library catalog record, thus providing good metadata. The catalog can be searched separately. Globally full text searchable.

In Advanced Full Text Search you can put Indians in the first (Full Text) field, and adjust the second field to Author exact phrase: Du Bois W E B. to find where W E B Du Bois wrote about Indians. Many of these books will not be full text viewable, but you can search within each book and find where (and how often) your word occurs. You can also limit your search to books with a particular Subject term

Internet Archive .

  • Full text for a variety of digitized print materials and archived web pages (Wayback Machine), as well as manuscripts (a few), digitized microfilm, films, audio files, TV News, and more.
  • In Advanced search you can search say Description: "South Asia", and at the top left of the results page choose Media type: Collection.  When on a Collection page, you can search within by metadata or full text

           Instructions for searching HathiTrust and Internet Archive

Other Digital Libraries and Collections

There are many other digital libraries, some general - some specialized, which offer digitized primary sources.  

The Digital Public Library of America offers textual, visual, and sound resources contributed by numerous libraries, archives, and museums.  Searches catalog records, not full text, and links to the items on the contributors' websites.  Contains many individual items, such as letters and photographs, from digital collections.

Digital Libraries by State: These websites list hundreds of local, state, and regional resources. Each is different and some are better designed than others.  Very useful when your topic has a regional focus.

Umbra Search is a search engine for African American digitized materials in numerous repositories

Finding Primary Sources Online  offers methods for finding digital libraries and digital collections on the open Web  and for finding Digital Libraries/Collections by Region or Language.  Note especially the Google Advanced Searches Described here.  For example:

  • all these words: Miami
  • any of these words: "digital archives" "digital collection" "digital library" "online collection" "primary sources"

Finding local online sources not available elsewhere. Includes local historical societies.

Bibliographies

Sometimes you can find a bibliography, a publication that lists other publications, on your subject. Search in HOLLIS with the word Bibliography as a Subject keyword search (Bibliography needs to be Subject keyword, NOT Keywords anywhere) :  "Water supply"  AND bibliography.  You can use Keywords anywhere for your other keywords in Advanced search.  Browsing a bibliography offers a different experience from database searching with keywords.

Archives

Harvard has enormous collections of archives and manuscripts.  These include the unpublished records of organizations and of individuals (often called personal papers and including correspondence (letters), notes, diaries and other material). They may be original collections located at Harvard, online, microfilm or print copies of collections at other institutions.

For archival material not at Harvard see the Library Research Guide for Finding Manuscripts and Archival Collections.

Census

United States Census Data Resources (Research Guide) 

The experts on the Census are in the Government Documents section in Lamont (govdocs@fas.harvard.edu)

City Directories

These list schools, churches, government agencies, charitable societies, fraternal organizations, etc.

The major online sources are:

For rural districts see Landownership Maps and Atlases. Available via Ancestry Library Edition: choose Card Catalog in the Search menu, then under Filter by collection, hit Maps, Atlases and Gazetteers, then North America.

Diaries and Other Personal Writings

Writings in which people reflect or report on their own lives and experiences are called personal writings.  They are sometimes written for publication (autobiographies, memoirs) and sometimes for private use (diaries, letters, although diaries are sometimes written with an eye to publication) and published posthumously.  Personal narratives are usually accounts of wars or diseases.  See also Oral Histories

To find them in HOLLIS Advanced Search search Subject : "civil rights workers" AND (sources OR diaries OR narratives OR correspondence).

Autobiographies usually bear the Subject term Biography, and so are not distinguished from biographies. The search Autobiographies OR Autobiography yields many autobiographies, but by no means all.

Memoir is not an official subject term.  Search memoir as a Keyword anywhere or Keyword title search

To find them in HOLLIS, search: Boston AND disasters AND (diaries OR archives OR correspondence).

Films/Videos

To find films about a place in HOLLIS,  go to Advanced search, adjust menu to Place, enter your place, then on the right side of the results screen, look at Resource Type and choose video/film. Example.

WorldCat Advanced Search

Deindustrialization
AND
Videorecording OR DVD OR films

 

Sheffield [Subject: Geographic term]
AND
Videorecording OR DVD OR films

Guide: Streaming Video @ Harvard

To find books about films about your topic, search Topic keywords AND Subject "in motion pictures". Example​

Government (US)

Government Documents

Technical reports

Government Documents: State and Local

You can do HOLLIS searches on a city as author.

For HOLLIS, use the “Browse HOLLIS By…” link on the basic search screen and browse Author: Chicago Ill.

LLMC Digital offers full text of legislative and judicial documents for many countries.  Open Online Services, then Browse Collections.

See also the State and Local Documents page of this guide.

Guidebooks

Guidebooks published for tourists and other visitors can be rich sources of historical information. Find them in HOLLIS Advanced search with:

Subject: Chicago Guidebooks

The Negro Motorist Green Book, by Victor Hugo Green. New York: Victor Hugo Green, 1936-1966.
--Intended to guide traveling African Americans in the Jim Crow era.
Online Version

Images

Records for many, but by no means all, individual Harvard University Library images are available in HOLLIS Images, an online catalog of images. Records include subjects and a thumbnail image.

Combining your topical words with the phrase "Pictorial Works" in HOLLIS yields books that are largely composed of pictures.

Historic American Buildings Survey/ Historic American Engineering Record

Photographs

Images of America: a history of American life in images and texts is the online version of thousands of books in the Arcadia US local history series. The histories Includes photographs from archives, historical societies and private collections. Images and text are fully searchable. Searchable by location, person, event, date, ethic group and organization. Search HOLLIS+ HOLLIS tab Advanced search as Series (exact phrase) Images of America for the print books.

Cities and Towns (Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress)

Cities and Buildings Database

Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991 (American Memory, Library of Congress)

The Urban Landscape: Digital Image Access Project (Duke University)

Gottoscho-Schleisner Collection - collection of images mostly of architectural items, mostly in the northeastern US, especially NYC and Florida.

National Geographic Photo Archive

Labor

Labor Archives in the United States and Canada: A Directory

Labor History (U Md research guide)

Labor Collections at Harvard

Law

Legal sources include the laws themselves, legislative histories of their passage, judges' opinions in appeals to higher courts (case law), periodical articles in law reviews, and other sources.  See Research Guide for History 97g: "What is Legal History? for sources

Magazines

Academic Search Premier (largely 1980s- ) is the usual index of first resort for general periodical searches. It indexes over 3000 journals in most fields plus many general interest periodicals. Full text is available for many of the periodicals. Includes Time full text back to 1923. Book reviews are included. A few periodicals have indexing back to the 1970s.

MasterFILE Premier (1980- ), designed for school and public library use, indexes more popular magazines than Academic Search Premier. A few magazines indexed back to circa. 1900.  Includes full-text Saturday Evening Post back to 1931.  Includes city and state based magazines. Currently published local magazines listed.

Opinion Archives offers a full text, as well as author/title, search of full runs of the following opinion periodicals:
American Spectator (1972- ) - Commentary – (1945- ) Commonweal (1924) - Dissent (1954- ) - Harpers Magazine (1850- ) - Moment (1975- )- NACLA (1966- ) - Nation (1965- ) - National Review (1955- ) - New Leader (1924- ) - New Republic (1914- ) - New York Review (1963- ) - New Yorker (1925- ) - Orion Magazine (1982- ) - Progressive (1909- )- Washington Monthly (1969- ) - Weekly Standard (1995- )

Periodicals Index Online indexes contents of thousands of journals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to 1995. Covers journals from North America, the United Kingdom, and the rest of the English-speaking world and journals in other European languages including French, German, Italian and Spanish. Includes the complete table of contents for each issue of each journal.

Reader's Guide Retrospective (WilsonWeb) (1890-1982), online version of the Readers' guide to periodical literature, indexes many American popular periodicals.

Maps

The Harvard Map Collection contains one of the world’s finest collections of maps. Although their atlases are in HOLLIS, many of their older, individual maps are not.

To search for maps in HOLLIS, use advanced search and limit by Location to Map Coll (Pusey).

Newspapers

See Guide to Newspapers and Newspaper Indexes.

For information on how an event was covered by news sources, search the phrase "Press coverage" in HOLLIS or the historical indexes along with your keywords.

Oral Histories

Participants in historical movements and events are often interviewed and asked to report and reflect on their experiences.

To find oral histories in a HOLLIS search: topical keyword (or Subject term) AND (interviews OR "oral histor*"); search (interviews OR "oral histor*") as Subject keyword.

Oral History Online indexes oral history collections, with links to interview-level bibliographic records and to full-text materials, audio files and visual files where these are available.

WorldCat. Use Advanced Search:

Subject: "Kennedy, Florynce"
AND
Subject: "oral histor*" OR Interview*

In WorldCat some items will be in transcript form only but may be available via scanning or Interlibrary Loan.  Many are available online.

In Google Advanced Search:

  • This exact phrase: Florynce Kennedy
  • Any of these words: "oral history" "oral histories" interviews

HistoryMakers: An African American oral video history archive

Policy Literature

PolicyFile (1990-) offers public policy reports and studies published by think tanks, university research programs, research organizations including the OECD, IMF, World Bank, the Rand Corporation, and a number of federal agencies.

Policy Archive is a digital library of public policy research containing over 30,000 documents.

Think Tank Search - from the Kennedy School of Government, a customized Google search of documents produced by think tanks.

Google advanced search. You can limit by domain: .org

Public Opinion

Roper Center for Public Opinion collects thousands of opinion polls. The iPoll search searches words in poll questions. The dataset search searches words in the summaries of polling studies. Both searches can be limited by date.

See the Public Opinion Sources guide for more resources. 

Statistics and Data

Statistics and Data Research Guides

Historical Statistics of the United States (HSUS). Includes US-level, not local, statistics.  

City-Data. Largely post-1990s information.

The Municipal year book, 1934- . Washington: International City Management Association.
HOLLIS Record
HathiTrust Full Text (1934-2007)

County and city data book. U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1947- .
Latest edition in Reference; backfile in stacks.  Includes number and % of work force in manufacturing
HOLLIS Record
Online version
Online version
2007 and 2000 ed.

Cities supplement, Statistical abstract of the United States: selected data for cities having 25,000 or more inhabitants in 1940. U.S. Dept. of Commerce, Bureau of the Census, 1944, 47 p.
HOLLIS record

Census of the United States (1880) Report on the social statistics of cities, by George E. Waring, Jr. Washington : Government Printing Office, 1886-1887. 2 v.
HOLLIS Record

The United States Economic Census.  Princeton has an excellent guide which lays out the numerous economic census publications, many with links to HathiTrust full text.  To find them at Harvard search the title as a phrase (in “”) in HOLLIS (Library Catalog) or in HathiTrust Catalog search.

Handbook of labor statistics. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, 1927-1990.

Television/Broadcasting

 

Library of Congress Motion Picture Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division holds vast numbers of films. Most are not available online, but copies can sometimes be purchased. Many of these films are available through American Memory and the Prelinger Archives of "ephemeral" (advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur) films in the Internet Archive (select Search Moving Images). If the film you want is not evident on the LC website, enquire directly as the collection is not fully cataloged.

Museum of Broadcast Communications offers the Encyclopedia of Television which includes articles on television programs, personalities and other topics witrh references.

Internet Archive includes films, radio audio clips, news clips, educational films, advertisements, industry films, etc.

American Archive of Public Broadcasting offers American public radio and television content dating back to the 1950s.

NBCUniversal Archives

Boston TV News Digital Library: 1960-2000 

March of Time (1935-1967). Time Inc.'s newsreel series.

AdViews: A Digital Archive of Vintage Television Commercials (1950s-1980s). Note that Sub-Collections breaks the collection down by individual company.

Internet Sites for Streaming Video (U. Nevada)

The Associated Press and British Movietone have put a huge collection of digitized newsreels (1895- ) into Youtube. Use Advanced Search to search by topic and specify date range.

American History in Video has numerous modern documentaries together with newsreels from 1929 to the present.

Travel Accounts

Find descriptions of cities or towns by travelers in HOLLIS by searching Advanced Search for the subject term “Description and Travel” AND the relevant geographical terms: "Boston" OR Massachusetts OR "New England" OR...

You can search for a keyword in travel books (Subject term: "Description and travel") on a certain city or state for a specified time period in Hathitrust Advanced Full Text Search by putting your keywords in the first search box and, in the second, as Title phrase, a specific book, or, as Subject, Boston "Description and travel".