You have to find a few different source types, primary and secondary. The following information will help you understand what they are, when to use them.
Primary sources are produced by participants or direct observers of an event or time period. These sources may be recorded during the event or later on, by a participant reflecting upon the event.
Why would I use them?
Primary sources offer a first-hand or eyewitness account of a situation that is unfiltered by interpretation.
What are some examples?
Newspapers
Reviews released at the time of a work's publication (films, books, etc.)
Speeches
Government documents
Legal documents
Public opinion polls
Personal materials, including letters, diaries, interviews, memoirs, autobiographies and oral histories
Artifacts and artistic output, including photos, paintings, drawings, poems, novels and other writings
How should I use them in my research?
To analyze primary sources, ask yourself these questions:
Databases with Primary Resources
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Offers a high-quality, interdisciplinary archive to support scholarship and teaching. Includes archives of over 1,000 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. The entire corpus is full-text searchable, offers search term highlighting, includes high-quality images, and is interlinked by millions of citations and references.
For more information on ebooks see the Ebook Guide
Secondary sources are interpretations and evaluations of primary sources. They are analyses of primary sources written by scholars and experts in a field after the time period or event has occurred.
Why would I use them?
Secondary sources have the benefit of hindsight. The author is able to contextualize the primary source in a way that takes into account other viewpoints and events that happened at the same time or afterwards.
Where are some examples?
How should I use them in my research?
Secondary sources are useful when you need an expert’s or scholar’s interpretation of a topic. This individual has spent her career researching primary documents and interpreting, analyzing and contextualizing them.
Databases with Secondary Resources
Unlimited users.
Updated daily. A comprehensive scholarly, multi-disciplinary full text database, with more than 5,300 full text periodicals, including 4,400 peer-reviewed journals. Offers indexing and abstracts for more than 9,300 journals and a total of 10,900 publications including monographs, reports, conference proceedings, etc.
Features PDF content going back as far as 1865, with the majority of full text titles in native (searchable) PDF format. Searchable cited references are provided for 1,000 journals.
Unlimited users.
Updated regularly. Contains the International Index to Film Periodicals, Treasures from Film Archives, Documentation Collections, and FIAF Members' Publications.Search this database along with its two companion databases (American Film Institute Catalog and Film Index International) at the Screen Studies Collection.
Unlimited users.
Updated monthly. Covers the entire spectrum of television and film writing. Subject coverage includes film & television theory, preservation & restoration, writing, production, cinematography, technical aspects, and reviews. Publications include Film Journal International, Journal of British Cinema & Television, Film Criticism, Post Script, Variety, as well as technical publications such as SMPTE. Mirroring the international film & television industries and cultures, FTLI also includes publications such as Cahiers du Cinema, Filmihullu, SegnoCinema, and Kinetoscopio.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 Generic License.