Hello and welcome to a special edition of Monday Methods. Today we are kicking off a multi-week project focused on how to find and apply sources in an essay or other written academic work.
Several of our flaired users have volunteered to contribute "how to" guides as part of this project. Today, /u/TenMinuteHistory will go over what a Primary, Secondary or Tertiary source is, and how they should be used. /u/Caffarelli will tackle two subjects. 1) accessing sources when you don't have university access. 2) how you can help a Reference Librarian best help you.
If you have questions on these topics, please ask them. The goal of this project is to demystify the process.
Next week, we will cover how to use Secondary sources after you have found them.
#How Not to Suck at the Library: Hot Tips for Undergraduates (And Some Grads I’ve Met Really Could Also Use This)
This is not a research guide proper. Other than the basics of using major databases and Worldcat, it’s actually very particular to your library, and should be taught to you as part of one of your very first Rhetoric or History or other writing-heavy classes in college. But these are tips that will serve you well in any academic library: and the rest, really, should follow naturally.
##1. Start Your Research Early
I fucking mean it. Don’t you dare go to the library website for the first time at 9pm on a Sunday for your 15 page paper due Monday. Your paper will suck butt, and the grader will know exactly what you did just by looking at your bibliography. A 24-hour bibliography sticks out like a sore thumb. Like “oh wow, this kid used nothing but Google Books previews, lol.” Now, I don’t care at all if you write the thing in a hot panic on that Sunday night, that’s your personal lifestyle choice and none of my business, but do the research early.
If you wait until the last minute you will automatically limit your library research to 1) only articles the library has full-text access to) and 2) only the books still on the shelves/e-books not checked out, because everyone else has passed those books up so they’re probably not the freshest or best books on the topic. This is all a crappy undergrad really needs to write a crappy paper truly, but you don’t want to be a crappy undergrad do you?
If you start your research just 1 week early, you can expand your research to 1) almost any modern article in the world (that is to say available through RapidILL which takes about 24 hrs to get an article to you) and 2) all the most common books in major academic libraries through ILL. This is all a good undergrad will likely need.
If you start your research a month early you can have just about anything in the world.
##2. If you need help with your research, please contact the librarian
Signs you may need to see a librarian:
You can ask for help any way you’d like it really. Librarians are desperate for your love and affection. We are lonely people, we sit in small chilly windowless offices eating terrible things like kale chips and hoping someone visits. You can feed a librarian your questions for just $0 a day.
You can contact a librarian through these means and more:
We did recently get rid of our fax line though. Sorry 88-year-old attorneys.
##3. Seriously that’s it.
You should also try different search terms over time, and explore the library website a bit. Try to be be patient, curious, and a bit dogged in your research topics. But mostly, just start early, and ask for help. :)
#Help I’m a Normal Person and not an Academic or Student, How Do I Get to Read All these Expensive Academic Books You all Insist on Recommending? (Or, how to stop spending money and learn to love the American library system)
Dear gentle reader,
I am sure you, like many, have googled a book recommended here and been dismayed to find out that it was either a) $120 b) several years out of print or c) several years out of print and $120. No wonder only turbo-nerds read these junky academic books you think, and hit the red X in the corner. But you want to post here, how do you get your hands on these dank academic sources and show your bona fides? I’m going to show you 3 ways to get your hands on expensive academic books for free or cheap. (Sadly, guide is only useful for Americans, because that’s what I know.)
##1. Your Local Public Library’s Interlibrary Loan System
Your local library is not limited to just the books it has in the building. Your first and easiest stop is to request a book you want from your public library’s ILL system. How this works: you want an older book your library does not own, so you fill out the ILL form or talk to the librarian who puts the order in for you. The librarian then finds a library that owns it, then requests it from that library, and pays the library a fee (ranging from $0 to ~$30.) That library then ships it to your library (at a special postal rate) and you come pick it up. You get the book for a shorter period than normal, usually 2 weeks, but you do get it, hooray!
Most libraries consider this a service included in the cost of your library card, but some do pass the ILL cost on to users, just ask at the service desk. To show you proof of concept that you can access ILL at your library, no matter how crappy it otherwise is, here are the ILL pages for the libraries for the allegedly top 5 worst places to live in America:
Your local public library can also handle academic articles.
##2. Your Favorite Nearby State University Library
Do you live in or near a State U town while not being a part of its collegiate vortex? Turns out it’s occasionally good for something besides traffic clogs and seeing young adults doing their grocery shopping in amusing states of undress! I’m going to let you in on a deep secret that few know about. I worked a front-line university library circ desk for about 4 years and saw it happen only a couple of times. Most state university libraries will lend their library materials to normal people with mere proof of state residency. This is called usually something like “community member borrowing privileges” and details on how to get these privileges will be buried deep in the circulation rules page on the library website. Occasionally there are modest fees to get a borrowing card, but usually it’s free. Let me show you some examples:
I can really do this all day, you get the idea.
Now, there are some downsides, your privileges are usually a little curtailed from the students’, like shorter loan periods and no renewals, but they are there! A library with community borrowing privileges will also almost always get you on-site computer privileges too, which means you can access those coveted academic databases, if you’re willing to spend your Saturday on a college campus.
No access? No worries, kick back to your public library’s ILL, even Harvard’s library lends out books through ILL.
##3. Your State Library
This is usually a very lovely building in your state capital. If you live in or near the state capital, feel free to just visit! The building is probably stuffed to the rafters with genealogists anyway. However materials will often be focused on general interest (non-academic) and state history. I have had great success on vintage knitting books from the state library though. Don’t live near it? No worries, it’s probably the biggest ILL lender in your state library system so you can get all those books at home anyway. Sometimes they will lend books directly, and sometimes they want you to request them through ILL at your home library for statistics purposes.
Questions or does something need clarity, please ask. If you need particular help you can PM me your location and I'd be happy to see what's available to you in particular.
Hello everyone!
AskHistorians is a very neat collaboration between experts, non-experts and just everyday people who happen to come here with questions about history. Due to the openness of the format we have many readers who may not have a background in history and want additional information not just about the history of a particular time or place, but have questions about what historians do and how we do it. We have had several questions recently about sources and hopefully the following can help to sort things out a little, alongside the other contributions from flairs.
Today I am writing about primary, secondary and tertiary sources, what they are and how historians tend to use them. First let’s introduce each kind of source, some examples, and how historians generally use them.
Primary sources are documents (broadly defined, it might not just be text!) that come directly out of the time and place being studied. These can be archival documents, letters, newspapers, works of art and many other kinds of documents/artifacts depending greatly on the time period and subject you are studying.
Historians use primary sources as their historical evidence. Historians build their narratives from primary sources and analyze them to make arguments about that history. You can not necessarily take primary sources as face value and simply assume they are giving an accurate depiction of what was going on when they were created. Methods and theory are important here, but I understand that those topics will be saved for another day. Suffice to say that the careful analysis of primary sources is an important part of being a historian and there is often disagreement among historians as to the meaning of primary sources and what conclusions can be drawn from them. In this sense, being a historian is not just a matter of collecting information from primary sources and presenting it, but also a matter of interpretation and argument.
Secondary sources are sources written by historians or other scholars that utilize primary sources and often other secondary sources. They do NOT come from the time period being studied. Most of the books and articles written by historians are your best examples of secondary sources. If you go to the library and pick up a book on such-and-such topic, it is probably a secondary source. Academic journal articles are secondary sources go through a process of peer-review.
In addition to being sources that make a historical argument, secondary sources are also in conversation with other secondary sources. You will find that secondary sources regularly make reference to the work of other scholars, their arguments, and their evidence. This might be to incorporate their conclusions into your own work or critique their analysis, but regardless secondary sources in history must acknowledge the work of other historians and the work they have done. This is why historians become widely read on a subject. It is important to know what other scholars have said about your topic. You cannot simply look at the primary documents themselves without any reference to other secondary sources, even if it simply to say they have been deficient in some respect that you hope to improve upon in your own work.
Tertiary sources summarize mainly secondary sources and sometimes primary sources. They often simplify things considerably to act as a quick guide or reference. Encyclopedias are the most common example. They might also be textbooks, almanacs, etc.
Tertiary sources stand out because they are often not acceptable for use as sources in scholarly works – they are too far removed from the original evidence and almost never contain the kind of contextualization within the larger literature that secondary sources have. Although there are exceptions, if you are writing history you are better off looking at the sources that the tertiary source uses rather than relying on the tertiary source itself. I feel, at this moment, that it is necessary to mention Wikipedia, that great and powerful tertiary source that we all know and (sometimes) love. Not incidentally, this is why Wikipedia is not an acceptable source in most academic settings. It is not a special kind of bad source, - it is not even "bad" in any kind of objective way. It is simply that encyclopedias in general are not very good sources when you are trying to write an academic paper. There are some other additional issues like difficult to track authorship and changing pages, but these I feel are actually less important in principle than just the usual problems with tertiary sources. They work just fine for checking a quick fact or trying to remember some person's name. They are less impressive when you are trying to build a real historical argument. Check out the sources at the bottom of the Wikipedia page (or other tertiary source) and start there.
What may or may not be clear already, but I think deserves to be said explicitly is that the type of source relates to the project being done. It is worth thinking about a few different kinds of projects and how sources might be used in the context of each. The above definitions are basically your “defaults” when people mention primary, secondary, or tertiary sources, but it can be a bit more complicated and sometimes unclear than that.
Imagine I am writing a history of Anglophone encyclopedias in the nineteenth century. Suddenly, the topic I am dealing with means that the encyclopedias are going to be primary sources for me. The topical information doesn’t suddenly become more trustworthy - it is still a tertiary source in relation to the topic, but now I am interested in questions like “what were these encyclopedias focusing on? In what style are they written? What can these answers tell us about some larger questions?” Suddenly what were tertiary sources that I said aren’t really useful as scholarly sources (about the ostensible topics) are the primary sources that are the core for a different kind of research.
When writing a historiography (a history of the history, such as it were), secondary sources are very much your “primary sources” in that you are interested in the interpretation of a topic by a variety of scholars, how trends in the field changed over time, what kinds of questions scholars asked, etc. Any graduate student in history will be very very familiar with the historiographic essay as a staple in their seminars.
Likewise, sometimes critiques of an entire field are written, such as Edward Said’s Orientalism. It certainly has a lot in common with a historiography and it is not an exaggeration to say that it is one of the most important books written for historians in the last 40 years (and Said himself is not a historian!). It has become an absolute staple when it comes to historical theory and methods by now.
The complications I added after my initial description should serve, most of all, to get people to hopefully think critically about the question they are asking and how it relates to what sources are appropriate for answering it, how they answer it, and how they can be used. The basic definitions/examples will cover the vast majority of the times the terms are used, but it is worth understanding that how a source relates to a project or topic is what ultimately determines what kind of source something is.
I'm linking /u/butter_milk's comment from an earlier Monday Methods because it mentions two very simple and very useful methods for finding more, related sources once you have gotten started.
I also want to reiterate /u/Caffarelli's point about getting started early. Shelf browsing can be a very useful technique, but you don't want to be searching after your classmates have already picked the shelf clean.