Primary and Secondary Sources

Primary and Secondary Sources

• Primary sources:
  • Original records/observations of people involved in or knowing about an event
  • "First-hand view" or "eyewitness" account
  • Not previously interpreted, evaluated, paraphrased, or condensed
  • Created at the time of the event being described
  • Examples: artefacts, manuscripts, autobiographies, recordings (audio, video, photos), creative works, administrative/legal documents, scientific papers, news articles
• Secondary sources:
  • Information from "second hand"
  • Summaries, analyses, interpretations, or evaluations of primary sources
  • Written after the event being described
  • Author has studied primary sources and interprets the "evidence"
  • Examples: almanacs, encyclopedias, history books, textbooks, biographies, news articles, graphs, pictures, data collections, movies, TV series

Use of Sources

• Advantages of primary sources:
  • Provide a "window into the past" with unfiltered access to records of artistic, social, scientific, and political thought during the specific period under study
  • Can give a real sense of what it was like to be alive during a long-past era
• Disadvantages of primary sources:
  • Questions of creator bias, purpose, and point of view may challenge students' assumptions
  • Often incomplete and lack context, requiring students to use prior knowledge and analyze multiple primary sources
• Advantages of secondary sources:
  • Provide analysis, synthesis, interpretation, or evaluation of primary sources
  • Can uncover background or historical information about a topic and broaden understanding
  • Allow readers to get expert views of events and bring together multiple primary sources
• Disadvantages of secondary sources:
  • Reliability and validity are open to question
  • Do not represent firsthand knowledge of a subject or event

Sources of Sources

• Archives, libraries, museums
• Digital sources:
  • Library of Congress (Digital Collections)
  • Internet Archive
  • Statistical Office of Slovenia (and other countries)
  • Eurostat (Tourism)
  • World Travel & Tourism Council (Insight reports)
  • UN World Tourism Organization (Tourism Statistics Data, Country Fact Sheets)
• Wikipedia:
  • Not a reliable source (anyone can edit)
  • Can be used to locate primary and secondary sources at the beginning of research