Q1: Archival research is fun, but primarily done digitally these days. Think less wandering through libraries with a lantern, more sitting with a cuppa in my pjs on a laptop. It's all about optimising your searches, trawling through non-searchable resources. In the instances where you have to visit an archive (lack of a freely available repository, for example), you email ahead, get in touch with an archivist from that very archive (they're better at this than you, as a historian), and they will either a) tell you they do not have it, please go to x other archive; b) give you a list of places within the archive to search your own goddamn self; or c) do b) and have a selection prepared for you on arrival. They may, of course, do d) tell you to piss off. In the event of d), find another archivist. To obtain an archivist of type c), bring them coffee, ask about their work, be a decent human being to them, and ask for their opinions on your own research. You're thinking x, where would they take it? Archivists are incredibly smart, have great research instinct, and know their source material extremely well. They are so much more than pen pushers, and it infuriates me when I see undergrads treat them so. Sorry, soapboxing...

Finding new evidence can be a matter of luck - I literally tripped over something that turned out to be a crucial piece of evidence for my doctoral thesis. It can also be a calculated search of sourcebooks (in my field, the Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum is a multi-volume concordance of every Latin inscription. Some inscriptions have not been examined since they were copied and pasted into the concordance). This is long, slow work, and relies on patience. Don't give up on Vol.3b page 1046. There could be something in Vol.12. Of course, it can be narrowed down, the same way you'd narrow a google search. Check the index, look for the right region, etc etc.

Q2: Some things are kept behind locked doors. It's easier if you have institutional affiliation, but not impossible without. Send an email, state your reason, experience, brief description of project, and affiliation (if any). You have to do this even if it's at a different institution from your own.

Q3: Yes, I have been told I did not have sufficient reason to access the Vatican archives. Which is fair. I didn't. Place is like a fortress. I got in two months later. It's amazing (but quite dull), and I keep trying to come up with reasons to go back.

Q4: Knowing source language is helpful, but not always necessary. The problem with not knowing is relying on others' translations. But, and it is a big but that I like, so I cannot lie. Dictionaries are other people's translations. Using a translation is not inherently bad, just pick a good one.

I have a different way of looking at this than /u/ClassicsDoc.

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The easiest way to access “new” material is to find texts that are known, but not deeply studied. You find these by reading secondary sources and looking at the footnotes.

For medieval and early-early modern Europe, my focus, there are what I’ll call “texts” and “archival sources,” which apply to their origins, not modern terms/locations. Texts are more like literature, fiction or nonfiction. Archival sources are stuff like court records, family papers/letters, financial transactions notes, and so forth.

For “texts,” in medieval, you can find A LOT of stuff digitized online now, from 19th-early 20th century academic journals preserved on (free) HathiTrust, archive.org, or Google Books. You find these by googling them individually, basically, having followed them in footnotes.

One thing to keep in mind for medieval Europe “texts” is that a lot of times, if you read a modern (19-20C) publication, it is either a copy of one manuscript of the original text, or a combination of multiple manuscripts into a nice “edition” (as it is called—a “critical edition” is a particular type of edition). In some cases, especially the Germans have published multiple manuscripts as separate editions in, like, 1892, and comparing editions can turn up some really interesting research.

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“Archival sources” are less likely to be published or digitized. Which means that, yes, you will also have to be in a modern archive to use them.

Once again, the best way to know about these is to follow footnotes in existing scholarship.

The second way is to use manuscript catalogues. Many of the older ones are digitized online. Others, you will have to go to a well-stocked library to look stuff up (for medieval in North America—Notre Dame, Toronto, Harvard, Princeton, etc). It’s very country/language specific, so ideally you’ll have someone to ask for some guidance to get you started.

When you get to the actual library with the actual sources, it is a good idea to ask the research librarian whether they know about any related records.

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For early print, there are online projects to catalogue “incunabula” or pre-1500 works, and then early modern prints (sometimes by century). The Gesamtkatalog des Wiegendrucke is my baby for 15C German; the Universal Short Title Catalogue is making a play for early modern Europe, period.

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I’ve not had a problem with access, personally. One thing that I could see happening—if a manuscript is undergoing a preservation process, it would not be accessible. If a text is considered too damaged to handle, same. BUT scholars are working on technology to see inside closed manuscripts and such, or read through pages.

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This does not cover serendipity, like when you’re looking at a 15C manuscript and discover that there’e a piece of a 13C one glued into the binding.

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In terms of reading OG manuscripts, papyri, early print—your biggest barrier besides language is handwriting (paleography). I’ll let /r/rusoved come share the best examples, which come from Slavic languages and writing styles. But suffice to say—for vernacular languages, you’re dealing with creative spelling, a hundred thousand abbreviations, and wildly different handwriting (sometimes good for its time, often very bad—just like today).

If you genuinely have the language skills: there are some summer courses you might be eligible for, or you could convince a grad program to let you audit. In all honesty, though, a paleography class is only marginally worth it. What you really need is just plain old, exhaustive, exhausting practice.

Oh, and a couple online guides to abbreviations. ;)

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I am on mobile right now, which is why this does not have links. Please feel free to ask if there’s anything particular you’re interested in—I cns pull it up for you later.

I hope this has been a comprehensible crash course—also please ask for clarifications!

In my field, medieval history, I would say it's extremely unlikely that you would find something completely new. Sometimes there will be a newspaper article about someone "discovering a lost text", but what they almost always mean is "someone is working on an obscure text that was always catalogued in a library but no one has bothered to look at it in a long time". There's lots of medieval texts like that! (And the librarians are the real heroes here, making sure everything is catalogued and accessible.) So it's not really about finding something new, although you may be working on something that no one has studied before, or you may be studying it from a new perspective.

When working with unpublished manuscripts, the actual process depends on the policies of the library/archive. I remember at the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, for example, I had to bring a letter from the director of the program where I was working (I was a post-doctoral researcher in France at the time). Then I got a card giving me access to the manuscripts. I had to fill out a form to request the manuscript (this can also be done online, now), and then they brought it out from the archives and I could read it in the reading room. The BNF is also just a regular library, so there were tons of students and other people there, but they couldn't look at the medieval manuscripts like I could.

Something that has changed a lot, even in just the past few years, is that libraries and archives are scanning their manuscripts and granting access to them online. All the manuscripts I had to go visit in person are now online for free, and I can read them at home. Some people will be working on things where it's still important to see the actual physical manuscript though. What is it made of? How is it bound? There may be things that don't show up in a scanned image, etc. (Also, it seems silly, but...holding the same book that a medieval person wrote in is pretty cool. A scan just isn't the same!)

I've never heard of anyone with the proper credentials being denied access to a manuscript, but it's possible that you can't do certain things with it. I wasn't allowed to take photos of most of the manuscripts I was looking at, for example (but again, now that they're all online, that doesn't matter).

For languages, when I was a student I had to know French and German (along with English, the most important languages in medieval scholarship), as well as Latin (the language most medieval European texts are in). We had to pass exams for those. We were also expected to learn whatever other languages we needed. For me, I had to learn Old French (the language of the manuscripts I mentioned above). I should have also learned ancient/medieval Greek, but I didn't; I did study classical Arabic, although not as fully as I should have. So we're definitely expected to be able to read and translate the original languages.

Keywords are, well, key. In my research on the Karankawa, it started with knowing their name. For this much, I did physically visit Galveston and learn a bit of history there. They were apparently still the subject of popular media (such as written articles) as late as the 1910s and 1920s, so I can imagine being able to stumble accidentally just as easily looking for something else as I did by watching a movie or two and listening to a general-island-history person. Once I had their name, I googled it - "Karankawa", "Karankawa language", "Karankawa book". I started looking for the language, actually, which led me to Mr. Gatschet's text. There's a bit of history in there, and looking for another source of this type led me to look for another book that might detail the history a bit more, since Gatschet rather provides an ethnography and a dictionary instead of a proper history. This proper history mentions the journals of a French and a Spanish explorer by name, which allowed me to find English translations thereof - and better yet, English translations from a time not too long after their original publishing, allowing me to get authors or translators with the same knowledge and mindset (more or less) as the original authors.

These were found online, mostly. Archive.org provided a lot of help, as did the Hathitrust Digital Library at (babel.hathitrust.org). My abilities did stumble a couple of times, such as running across books or articles that were locked behind paywalls. I'm lucky, I guess, that the more vital information is old enough to be publicly available for the most part. More recent things on JSTOR were of use as well, this being free to access (albeit with limited uses) via google accounts. A lot of my research involved dedication in my searches and finding workarounds. If I can't view it on one site, I'll just find it somewhere else. Keep going for potentially hours until you get something you can work with.

Speaking as someone who researches pre-WW1 British naval history and armaments (think 1860-1918 roughly), I have it much harder and much easier in some regards. I don't have to worry about translation, but not much of what I want is digitised.

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The first and easiest thing you do in locating resources is consult other people's footnotes and bibliographies. That'll yield a list of archives and collections to visit and peruse documents at. This is, for some people, the beginning and end of the process. It's also the mark of a poor historian, because it shows a lack of drive to do anything but follow in the footsteps of other people. If they missed something, so will you.

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The second thing to do is take to whatever resources of use that you can find, and try to expand your search. This can be googling key people on things like jischub to see if new papers have been lodged or missed by other historians. It might be going through old journals and publications which aren't digitised in search of relevant material. Or even new stuff which has only be digitised recently. Pawing through the last ten years worth of accessions to UK archives (all of them) in the hope of identifying something which might be of use. The goal is essentially to try and locate new repositories with the tools at your disposal, namely the internet and a damn good library. This is what a good historian should be doing before publishing anything on anything. They might not find anything, but they can then at least sit back and know that nothing will appear that they missed through professional neglect.

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The final step is one which even many professional historians usually don't bother with without considerable cause, and that's actively spending a large amount of time locating new sources personally. This can involve substantial genealogical work to track down family members in the hope that some dusty box of papers might be in an attic somewhere. Alternatively, it might involve trying to get into a restricted collection (like the Admiralty library at Portsmouth) in the hope that something previously unseen will crop up. You keep an eye on auction houses when they're selling off historical ephemera and documents for relevant items of interest. And so on. I know of one company archive that was literally pulled out of the bins behind the HQ in a secret midnight raid when the company went defunct, for example.

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Most historians don't have time to go beyond the second step, but the third one (despite being probably the least productive) is in many ways, the most rewarding. I'm sitting on a little stash of correspondence and one of a kind old books I've amassed which will go to a larger archive when I die. I've also had the opportunity of meeting many additional people of varying levels of eminence (top tip:- aristocrat families often have private archives).