Library

• A primary source is a document or physical object which was written or created during the period being studied. These sources were present during an experience or time period and offer an inside view of a particular event.  Also included are works created later by an eyewitness or a participant in an event, e.g. memoirs/autobiographies.

Types of primary sources

• Original documents (including excerpts and translations): diaries, speeches, manuscrips, letters, interviews, news film footage, autobiographies, official records, ancient literature, magazine and newspaper articles.
• Creative works: poetry, drama, novels, printed music, sound recordings, art.
• Relics or artefacts: pottery, furniture, clothing, buildings.
• Statistics and raw data
• Reproductions, facsimiles or replicas of original documents, creative works or artefacts are also acceptable as primary sources.

Examples of primary sources:

Winston and Clementine; the personal letters of the Churchills

The Gladstone diaries

Economic effects of the war upon women and children in Great Britain [microform] 

The Constitution of Canada

Newspaper article from the time an event occurred

Jane Austen's novel "Pride and Prejudice"

Photographic reproduction of artist Frederic Leighton's "Greek Girls Picking up Pebbles by the Sea"

A journal article reporting new research or finding

Finding primary sources in the library collection

   1. Original documents can be found by consulting the Archives and Research Collections (ARC) website.
   2. Reproductions can be found by checking the library catalogue.

Use specific words to locate primary sourcees in the Library catalogue, such as: correspondence, sources, diaries, letters, personal naratives. KEYWORD search examples:

• [PERSON’S NAME] and s:correspondence
• [PERSON’S NAME] and s:diaries
• [PERSON’S NAME] and s:letters
• [KEYWORD] and s:sources

In the electronic and microform collections

Historical Digital Collections
 

General Collections of Documents

• 19th Century British Pamphlets Online
• BBC Radio 4 Collections
• British History Online
• British Museum
           Broadsides
           Playbills
           Trade Cards
• C19: The Nineteenth Century Index
• Early English Books Online (EEBO)
• Early Manuscripts at Oxford University

Beginning with collections of Celtic manuscripts from several Oxford libraries (manuscripts digitised in this phase date from the 9th to the 19th centuries, and are of Irish, Welsh, Cornish and Breton origin), the project was subsequently extended to include a broader range (dating from the 9th to the 16th centuries and of various origins).

• Eighteenth Century Book Tracker

A clear­ing­house for dis­cov­er­ing and shar­ing links to eight­eenth-cen­tu­ry pri­mary ma­te­ri­als and aims to build a da­ta­base of bib­lio­graph­ically ac­cu­rate rec­ords that link to freely-a­vail­able texts on­line. Covers periodicals as well.

• Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO)
• Eighteenth Century Journals
• English Heritage Archives
• English Historical Documents
• EuroDocs: History of the United Kingdom - Primary Sources
• Mass Observation Online
• Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue
• Official documents of the UN
• Oxford Digital Library

List of Collections available HERE.

• University of Oxford Text Archive
• Web of English History

Crime and Punishment

• Dying Speeches & Bloody Murders

Digitized collection of more than 500 English broadsides dating from 1707 to 1891.

• HeinOnline English Reports, Full Reprint, 1220-1867

More than 100,000 of the most important early English cases that laid the foundation for the laws of nations under the British Empire.

• The Newgate Calendar

The Newgate Calendar was a hugely popular publication of the 18th and 19th centuries. It was originally a monthly bulletin of executions, produced by the keeper of Newgate prison in London. Reprinted version of cases also available.

• The Proceedings of the Old Bailey

A fully searchable edition of the largest body of texts detailing the lives of non-elite people ever published, containing 197,745 criminal trials held at London's central criminal court.

• SOLON Database of Crime Reportage (1851-1890)

Economics

• Coin and Conscience: Popular Views of Money, Credit and Speculation (Harvard University)
• Documents for the History of Economics

Empire, Exploration and Travel

• Act of Union Virtual Library

Searchable collection of primary source material relevant to the 1801 Act of Union between Ireland and Great Britain. Includes pamphlets, parliamentary papers, newspaper articles and manuscripts.

• Arctic Blue Books Online

Arctic Blue Books online is a searchable version of Andrew Taylor's unique index to the 19th Century British Parliamentary Papers concerned with the Canadian Arctic.

• British Voices from South Asia (Louisiana State University Libraries)

The exhibition is a series of taped interviews -- conducted by Professors Frank de Caro and Rosan Augusta Jordan of the LSU English Department -- with British people who lived and worked in India before Independence in 1947. Collectively they provide a sort of "self-portrait" of a colonial subculture and accounts of how Europeans experienced a great Asian society under the peculiar conditions of their time. Quotations from the interviews have been included for each section of the exhibition. These first-person "testimonies" allow the visitor to experience history through the immediacy of spoken recollections.

• The Digital South Asia Library (University of Chicago)
• Empire Online
• South Seas Voyaging and Cross Cultural Encounters in the Pacific (National Library of Australia)
• Travel Writing: a Vision of Britain Through Time

This is the largest collection of historical British travel writing on the web. Each author gives a different perspective on the towns and villages they visited.

Government and Politics

• Avalon Project: Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy
• Cabinet Papers, 1915-1978 (British National Archives)
• Churchill Archives Centre
• Documents Illustrating Jacobite History
• Hansard 1803-2005
• Henry III Fine Rolls Project

The Henry III Fine Rolls Project is a pioneering enterprise in publishing for the first time an English calendar of the fine rolls from 1216 down to 1248 in the form of an electronic edition including the digital facsimile images.

• Horace Walpole's Correspondence
• House of Commons Parliamentary Papers (HCPP)

This collection comprises the most detailed primary source for the 19th century for Britain, its colonies and the wider world. These were working documents of the governments of the day for all areas of social, political, economic and foreign policy.

• Journal of the House of Lords

Available dates:  1509-1614, 1620-1649, 1660-1681, 1685-1793, 1830-1832

• Pamphlet Collection (British Library of Political and Economic Science)

Digitized collection of 19th and 20th century pamphlets.

• State Papers Online: the Government of Britain, 1509-1714

State Papers Online, 1509-1714 is a collection of English government documents originating from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

• UK Publications on the Internet (Stationery Office)

Provides an index to Stationery Office publications by date, title, and government department, as well as to official publications by category.

• UK Treaties Online

Literature

• 19th Century Yellowbacks (Emory University)

Yellowbacks were cheap, 19th century British literature sold at railway book stalls, with colorful, sensational covers to attract buyers. While some were well-known books such as “Sense and Sensibility,” many of the yellowbacks were obscure titles by authors unknown today.

• At the Circulating Library: a Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837-1901
• Baldwin Library of Historical Children's Literature
• Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads
• British Fiction 1800-1829: a Database of Production, Circulation and Reception
• British Women Playwrights around 1800
• British Women Romantic Poets 1789-1832
• Celebration of Women Writers: Great Britain
• Eighteenth Century E-Texts
• English Literature: Restoration and the 18th Century (1660-1785)
• The Online Books Page (University of Pennsylvia)
• Renascence Editions

Online repository of works printed in English between 1477-1799

• Revolution and Romanticism

Database of digitised British street literature, published between 1790 and 1840.

• TLS Historical Archive, 1902-2006
• Victorian Women Writers Project

Local and Regional History

Ireland:

• Act of Union Virtual Library: the Digital Resource for the Act of Union of 1800
• Irish History Online

London:

• Bolles Collection on the History of London
• Hogarth's London
• London 1753
• London Lives 1690-1800

Scotland:

• Drawn Sword: Engravings and Woodcuts from the MacBean Jacobite and Stuart Collection
• Maps of Scotland (National Library of Scotland)
• Records of the Partliaments of Scotland to 1707
• The Word on the Street

Searchable collection of nearly 1,800 broadsides from Scotland between 1650 and 1910.

Wales:

• People's Collection Wales

Medicine and Health

• Contagion: Historical Views of Diseases and Epidemics

Science and Technology

• The Industrial Revolution and the Railway System
• Science in the 19th Century Periodical

Electronic index of the scientific content of sixteen general periodicals. Contains entries for over 14,000 articles and references to more than 6000 individuals and 2500 publications.

Slavery

• North American Slave Narratives
• Parliament and the British Slave Trade
• Slave Movement During the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century
• Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice
• Transatlantic Slave Trade Database

Society

• British Cartoon Archive

Searchable database of over 150,000 editorial, socio-political and pocket cartoons dating back to 1904.

• Charles Booth Online Archive

Charles Booth Online Archive contains digitized versions of poverty maps, police notebooks and the Booth family magazine, The Colony.

• Early Comics Archive: Comics from 1700 to 1930
• English Broadside Ballad Archive (University of California)
• Fabian Society Online Archive

The Fabian Society started publishing tracts in 1884, and included in this site are most tracts up to 1997.
The site also includes a collection Fabian Society "Minute Books."

• Georgians (British Library)
• Guardian Century

Collection of articles from The Guardian of major events over the 20th century, dating from 1899.

• Hidden Lives Revealed: Children in Care 1881-1918

Features the full contents of around 150 case files of children in the care of the The Waifs and Strays' Society from Victorian and Edwardian times.

• Historical Directories

Digital collection of local and trade directories for England and Wales from 1750-1919

• Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection (Yale University)

The Lewis Walpole Library Digital Collection presents images from the Library's collections. The main focus of the collection is the Library's world-renowned collection of English caricatures and political satirical prints from the late-seventeenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries.

• London Lives 1690-1800
• Studies in Scarlet: Marriage Sexuality in the U.S. and U.K., 1815-1914
• The Workhouse: the Story of an Institution

War

• The Drawn Sword: Engravings and Woodcuts from the MacBean Stuart and Jacobite Collection

Searchable collection of 1,300 digitized engravings and woodcuts dealing with the Jacobite rebellions maintained by the University of Aberdeen Historic Collections.

• Prints from the Curzon Collection: Images of Napoleon and British fears of invasion, 1789-1815

Digital collection of 1400 prints.

Women

• Defining Gender, 1450-1910

• Queen Victoria's Journals

Digital images of every page in the entire sequence of Queen Victoria's diaries. Provides full transcriptions and keyword searching of the journal entries covering the period from Queen Victoria's first diary entry in July 1832 to her marriage to Prince Albert in February 1840. At the time of launch (May 2012), only a portion of the transcribed text will be available. More transcriptions are being added regularly as the project progresses.

Newspapers:

Times Digital Archive (1785-1985)

British Newspapers 1800-1900

Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals: 1800-1900

CENTER FOR RESEARCH LIBRARIES

The Center for Research Libraries (CRL)
A great institution to check for historical documents, newspapers, journals, archives and other sources. "The Center for Research Libraries (CRL)" is a consortium of North American universities, colleges, and independent research libraries. The consortium acquires and preserves newspapers, journals, documents, archives, and other traditional and digital resources for research and teaching and makes them available to member institutions through interlibrary loan and electronic delivery." Carleton University Library is a mermber of CRL.

ARCHIVES

National Archives UK