Primary sources are first-hand accounts of events or conditions during a particular time period, often recorded contemporaneously by participants or observers.

Some types of primary sources include:

• Diaries, journals, letters, speeches, manuscripts, notes and other written material describing experienced or observed events.
• Autobiographies and memoirs describing experienced or observed events in hindsight.  Although such hindsight can bias the record of events, at times such reminiscences may provide the only available data on certain occurrences.  Alternatively, autobiographies and memoirs can provide clues as to how the author and his contemporaries viewed a past event.
• Published items, such as articles in magazines, journals or newspapers, or books, which report on contemporary events. 
  
• Photographs, films, videos, news broadcasts and transcripts, audio recordings, etc. documenting contemporary events.
• Any physical artifact, such as art objects, costumes, buildings, maps, monuments, etc.
• Governmental and organizational information, such as statistics, reports, press releases, propaganda, records, surveys, correspondence, publications, etc.
• Materials which provide a sociological or psychological snapshot of a certain time period, such as public opinion polls or other expressions of popular culture such as television shows, movies, music, best-sellers, advertisements, etc.

Tips on finding primary sources in library catalogs

The keyword searching option can turn up additional published primary sources. Try entering terms like "correspondence," "diary" or "diaries," "records" and "documents." Some other promising terms ("sources," "papers" and "letters") occur in too many records to be of much practical value.

These subject headings, issued by the Library of Congress, describe materials listed in most library catalogs. You should know that Subject Headings assigned to books are not necessarily intuitive or logical. For instance, the Subject Heading for Native Americans is NOT Native Americans but Indians of North America.

Standard cataloging procedures attach a few formulaic subheadings to many records that qualify as primary sources. Watch for these words or phrases when you scan retrieved sets of titles, or enter them under the SUBJECT HEADING search option:

• "--Sources"
• "--Personal Narratives"
• "--Description and Travel"
• "--Facsimiles"
• "--Charters, Grants, Privileges"
• "--early works to 1800"
• "--periodicals"
• "--Interviews"
• "--Correspondence"
• "--Pamphlets"