Research Guides: A Guide to Comparative Cultural Studies and Humanities Research: Finding Primary Sources

Where to Find Primary Visual Sources

Primary visual sources can include paintings, sketches, textiles, manuscripts, maps, letters, diaries, photos, and sculptures.

ARTstor Digital Library - Database of images. Collections encompass art, architecture, music, religion, anthropology, literature, world history, American Studies, and more.
The MET Timeline of Art History - Interactive and visual guide.
Bibliothèque nationale de France
JSTOR - Good for historical resources and primary sources, especially world history. Be sure to limit by year, language and format. For more info, view this tutorial.

Library of Congress: American Memory
American Memory provides free and open access through the Internet to written and spoken words, sound recordings, still and moving images, prints, maps, and sheet music that document the American experience.
Internet Archive
Cultural artifacts in digital form.
In the First Person
High quality, professionally published, in-depth index of close to 4,000 collections of personal narratives in English from around the world

Coit Tower Murals and History
Islamic Heritage Project
IHP is a digital collection of hundreds of manuscripts, printed texts, and maps relating to Islam.

Chronicling America
Library of Congress site linking to newspapers from 1860-1920.
U Penn Libraries Guide to Historic Newspapers Online
Links to freely accessible 19th and 20th Century newspapers organized by state.
Colorado Historic Newspaper Collection
"The Colorado Historic Newspapers Collection (CHNC) currently includes more than 500,000 digitized pages, representing 163 individual newspaper titles published in Colorado from 1859 to 1923. Due to copyright restrictions, CHNC does not generally include newspapers published after 1923."(source: CHNC website)
Google News Archive
"Search results can include content that is freely accessible as well as content that requires a fee."
New York Times Archive
From 1859 - 1922.

Primary sources can be challenging to find. The following strategies and resources are good places to start.

When searching primary sources:

Start early. Locating primary sources that fit your research often takes several steps.
Get help. Schedule an appointment with a librarian. When requesting an appointment, be sure to provide specifics about your research topic and what types of sources you need to locate.
Be prepared to utilize information in multiple formats. The best sources for your topic may not be digitized or available online. You may need to use books, microfilm, microfiche or archived documents.

When searching in the Library Catalog, subject headings can designate primary source types. For example:

Impressionism (Art) -- France -- Paris.

In addition, the Advanced Search tab in WorldCat will allow you to limit to Archival Sources.

WorldCat includes records for materials owned by libraries around the world.

Search by keyword, title, or author: