Research Guides: Finding Resources: Primary Sources

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Primary Sources

Primary vs. Secondary Sources: What’s the Difference?

Primary sources are original materials created at the time of an event or by someone directly involved. They include things like letters, photographs, interviews, maps, government documents, and historical newspapers. These sources give you firsthand evidence and let you interpret events or ideas for yourself.

Secondary sources are created after the fact, often by someone analyzing or interpreting primary sources. Examples include textbooks, scholarly articles, documentaries, and essays. Many information sources you may have used in the past were likely secondary sources. These help you understand how others have studied or explained a topic.

Why use primary sources for research?

Primary sources, like letters, photographs, interviews, maps or official documents, offer direct insight into historical events, cultural moments or lived experiences. They help you:

Engage with original evidence rather than interpretations or summaries
Build your own analysis by examining materials firsthand
Explore diverse perspectives, especially when you seek out sources from underrepresented communities
Add depth and authenticity to your arguments

Using primary sources also encourages critical thinking. Ask yourself: Who created this? Why? Whose voices are missing? This kind of questioning is key when you're exploring topics related to identity, power or social justice.

Caution: When working with primary sources, it's important to consider whose voices are represented—and whose might be missing. Many historical documents, images or recordings reflect dominant perspectives of their time and may exclude or misrepresent marginalized communities. Think critically about context, authorship and bias, especially when exploring topics related to race, gender, class, or other intersecting identities.

Finding Primary Sources in Discovery

To find primary sources in Discovery, follow the steps below or watch the short demonstration video.

Use the search bar on the library website or navigate to the advanced search page.
Enter your keywords into the search bar and run the search.
Click the Source Type button. Select primary sources.
Select a title of interest and review the item details opening the title link.
To access the full text of the article, click on the Access Options menu to view the formats in which the article is available. You can also download it using the Download button if it appears.

Recommended Databases for Primary Sources

American Historical Periodicals from the American Antiquarian Society
BC Points to the Past
BC Points to the Past is a collection of primary sources, reviews, newspapers and other documents open to everyone within the province of British Columbia. Search all BC Points to the Past content here.
Canadiana Online
The Canadiana Online collection contains 19 million pages (96,000 titles) of digitized historical publications, including monographs, serials, and government publications over the past three and a half centuries.
Canadian National Digital Heritage Collection

The Canadian National Digital Heritage Index (CNDHI) is an index of Canadian heritage collections located at Canadian universities and provincial and territorial libraries. Supported by funding from Library and Archives Canada and the Canadian Research Knowledge Network, CNDHI is designed to increase awareness of, and access to digital heritage collections in Canada, to facilitate information sharing within the Canadian documentary heritage community. [Description from publisher]
Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920
Gale Primary Sources gathers the raw data about crime, its solutions, and the popular response into one archive, Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920. The archive's focus is on the most rapid period of evolution for crime and its associated legal/penal systems: the long nineteenth century, a period of major social upheaval and technological development, from wars to the Industrial Revolution. Almost all aspects of society underwent transformation during this time, and the law adapted to these changes.

Crime has had an enduring fascination, from the bloodstained narratives of myth and folklore to the Bible, from Cain and Abel onwards. How crime should be best prevented, contained, and penalized has been a persistent concern of legal and judicial authorities throughout time. As society has developed over the millennia, so have its crimes, and also the response to them, from prison reform to forensics and policing. Popular culture's reactions to crime matter and have inspired genres such as the murder ballad and the detective novel.
Defining Gender, 1450-1910
Defining Gender provides access to a vast body of original British source material that will enrich the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology and education from a gendered perspective
Frontier Life

This digital collection of primary source documents helps us to understand existence on the edges of the anglophone world from 1650-1920. Discover the various European and colonial frontier regions of North America, Africa and Australasia through documents that reveal the lives of settlers and indigenous peoples in these areas.
Gale Primary Sources
Helps scholars find a starting point, search across a wide array of primary source materials and points in time, and discover new ways to analyze information.
Heritage
Héritage includes 41 million pages (over 900 collections) from some of Canada's most popular archival collections chronicling the country and its people from the 17th to the mid-20th centuries. The majority of the material in Héritage is handwritten.
Indigenous Peoples: North America
Includes manuscripts, monographs, newspapers, photographs, motion pictures, images of artwork, and more.
Medieval Travel Writing
This new collection from Adam Matthew Digital presents manuscripts of some of the most important works of European travel writing from the later medieval period. The chief focus is on journeys to central Asia and the Far East, including accounts of travel to Mongolia, Persia, India, China and South-East Asia.
Sabin Americana, 1500-1926
Includes books, pamphlets, serials and other documents that provide original accounts of exploration, pioneering, settlement, trade, colonialism, slavery and abolition, the western movement, Native Americans, military actions and much more. Regions covered include North, Central and South America, the Arctic and Antarctica, and the West Indies.
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490 - 2007
Bringing together primary source documents from archives and libraries across the Atlantic world, this resource allows students and researchers to explore and compare unique material relating to the complex subjects of slavery, abolition and social justice.

In addition to the primary source documents there is a wealth of useful secondary sources for research and teaching; including an interactive map, scholarly essays, tutorials, a visual sources gallery, chronology and bibliography.
Smithsonian Collections Online
Spans primary source materials from:
- World's Fairs and Expositions
- Trade Literature and the Merchandising of Industry
- Smithsonian Magazine 1970-2010
- Air & Space Magazine 1986-2010

For a deeper dive into primary sources, check out the following guides:

Canadian History
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European History
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American History
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