Your first step in the process is to decide what you mean by primary source materials. For one project, newspaper articles may be considered secondary sources, and for another project newspaper articles may be primary source materials. In the sciences, scholarly articles reporting research conducted are considered primary source materials, but in the humanities scholarly articles are considered secondary sources.
Once you know what type of materials you require for your project, you can contact the Research Center to discuss your options. Penrose Library’s Special Collections & Archives department has primary source archival materials in a variety of formats, including digital versions of materials available via Digital DU. Over the past few years, Penrose Library has built commercial digital collections of primary source materials, such as rare books, broadsides, ephemera, newspapers, manuscripts, archives, images, and more. In addition, many academic and public institutions with archival collections are digitizing the documents and making them freely available on the Web.
You might be interested in consulting the research guides we have created which point to primary source materials in various disciplines, such as Social Work (US Health Care Policy and US Immigration Policy), British Studies, Art and Art History, Immigrant Voices in Modern America, Latin American Political Economic Development, and discipline-based resources available in Special Collections & Archives (Archival Resources).
After identifying what you mean by “primary source materials,” however, your best next step may be to make an appointment with a reference librarian in the Research Center, in order to locate the primary source materials that fit the requirements of your project. Primary source research can be complicated, and with such a wealth of digital materials available both through Penrose Library and freely-available on the Web, consulting with a librarian will make identifying and locating this type of material much easier.
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