Primary Sources Online

Primary Sources Online "Tens of thousands of archival collections can be found on the web," says Leslie F. Stebbins. "These digitized primary resources provide researchers with unprecedented access to collections that previously were only available in one location and kept behind locked doors." Also available online, notes the author of Student Guide to Research in the Digital Age: How to Locate and Evaluate Information Sources (Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 2006), 68. are "information (which) indicates what is owned by a particular archive and…search aids that give a detailed inventory of the holdings of a particular collection and other descriptive information." In Find Digitized Primary Source Collections on the Web, Stebbins guides researchers to some larger online digital library collections, archival search engines and "tools that point to digitized and print collections," and information on collections available outside the U.S. And "If you have some flexibility with the topic you are working on," the author suggests, "you might want to try one of the larger collections such as the American Memory Project. Locate an interesting collection and work backward to the development of your topic." |More