Find background information about authors & works, context in literary movements, culture, and history, and important scholarship.
This guide includes resources for finding both primary and secondary sources. When you are searching in the library, it's important to know that Library of Congress call numbers are arranged first by geography:
... and then within those areas by general chronological period. Within chronological periods, works are listed alphabetically by author, and shelved along with critical commentary about their works.
Whether a source is primary or secondary depends less on its format than on its distance from the object of study.
A primary source is a first-hand account of the object of study; it is reported by a person who directly experienced, witnessed, or created it. Here are some things often used as primary sources: diaries, memoirs & autobiographies, letters, original manuscripts, interviews, photos, & videos, and articles by scientists publishing their own research. A novel, short story, essay or poem is also a primary source, when the object of study is the literary work itself. Think of a primary source as data.
A secondary source can be an interpretation of--or commentary or criticism on--the object of study. The author, such as a journalist or scholar, relies on other people's first-hand accounts. For instance, a literary interpretation of the novel Moby Dick is a secondary source about Moby Dick, as is a history text that draws on Melville's diaries. Think of a secondary source as analysis of or reporting on data.
Because primary or secondary are relative to the object of study and not absolute categories, a source that might be secondary in one context could be primary in another. For example, a newspaper editorial about Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech that you use as a source for analysis of the speech would be a secondary source, but the same article used as evidence in a paper about how King was represented in the press would be primary.
Note: Primary & secondary are not a measure of how credible a source is. Both primary and secondary sources can vary in their credibility or authority: just as a primary source can be limited in perspective or heavily biased, a secondary source could represent primary sources incompletely or out of context. On the other hand, a primary source could establish the truth of an event, or a secondary source could assemble a wide body of primary sources with differing perspectives to create a comprehensive account.
