 Alright, so thank you guys so much for joining us today for our workshop called Know Where to Go, Primary Sources. Just a couple of quick announcements. The session is being recorded and will be uploaded to the library's YouTube account. So if you unmute yourself during the first half an hour, the recorded section, your name and your video will be included, which is totally fine with us. But if you want to avoid that, please use chat for any questions or comments until we announce that it's no longer being recorded. Also, if you're viewing this recording, please note that some information might have changed throughout the semester, so just be sure to check the library from its up-to-date information. And now to introduce ourselves, Michael, do you want to go first? Thanks, Amber. Hello, everyone. My name is Michael Deike. I'm a Commons librarian at Hodges Library. I work at the front desk a lot and do a lot of research assistance. And sessions like this as well. Of course, my email is listed on there, so if anybody has any questions after this session, feels comfortable asking them of me, you're always welcome to send me an email. Awesome. And my name is Amber Sewell. I issue her pronouns. I'm the teaching and learning librarian here at Hodges Library. And there is my email address as well. I love answering questions from students, so please feel free to hit me up after this. So at the end of this workshop, you'll have learned what a primary source is, some strategies to make researching primary sources easier, and most importantly, where to find them. So to get started, we have to answer the question, what is a primary source? And a very simple definition is that it's a direct record of an event or a subject. And this is kind of in opposition to secondary sources, which talk about an event that's already happened. So say you have a documentary, which is a secondary source, but that includes live footage, say, of a shuttle launch. And so that live footage is going to be your primary source and your documentary is using that to comment on the shuttle launch, if that makes any sense. This can be relative though. There is no like black and white when it comes to a lot of this. So a book review is typically a secondary source, unless you're talking about how a book is received. So let's say you want to research the difference between a white fantasy author like V.E. Schwab's books versus a black fantasy author like N.K. Jemisin. Then those book reviews written at the time of publication. So in magazines and newspapers on Bookstagram, any tweets, all of those could then be considered primary sources because your subject of research is the reaction itself. When in doubt, ask your professor. They're the person who decides your grade. So if you were not sure if something counts as a primary source or not, definitely send them an email. They'll be the deciding vote. So some examples of primary sources. Of course, we've got images, diaries, letters, use paper articles, works of art advertisements or some of my favorite types of primary sources. But you also have things like tweets or blogs or interviews and some types of videos. All of these can be things that you can use as primary sources. A couple of things to keep in mind when you're researching primary sources. First, you want to think about the type of primary source that you're going to be looking for. And this really depends on what you're researching. So if you're researching government responses to natural disasters, you're going to want a government report or a newspaper article. But if you're in like a myths and monsters class and you are looking at, you know, how dragons have been depicted, you might go for artwork as your primary source. Next, you want to consider the time period. And this can be important for a variety of reasons. One, you need to know what kind of primary sources are available from that time period. Video sources are going to be easier to find from our current events. And you're also going to want to think in terms of the search terms that you're using. So say if you were looking at advertisements for World War One, you're not going to find results if you search for World War One because it was called the Great War until World War Two started. This is often when I recommend people go to Wikipedia and try to find alternate terms for something because you're going to want to use the language they used while the event was happening. And the last reason the time period is important is because one of the things Michael will show when he demonstrates how to find these is a lot of our databases include a filter for dates. So if you are looking for an event that happened in a very specific time frame, you can actually let the databases do a lot of work for you and filter out things that aren't relevant. And lastly, there are some things that they're not going to be primary sources for. This can be an interesting thing to comment on whose story was worth preserving. And sometimes that means that you go searching for something and it doesn't exist. And those are just a couple of quick tips on things to keep in mind when you start researching. Now I'm going to let Michael share his screen and show you where to find these sources. Thanks Amber. All right, I should have my screen shared now, and I'm unmuted. So you should be seeing a page. It's the main library website liv.utk.edu, and I'm going to take you through the process of how to actually get to our primary source databases, and how to search a couple of them. This will not be comprehensive. One thing about primary sources is that there's not a singular central location where you could find, say, all of them, they tend to be scattered about in a lot of different databases. So a smaller amount of items spread about in a lot of different areas. But we have a few resources available to you through the library that'll help you narrow down your searches and get you to the place that you need to be. So if you start on the library's main page, liv.utk.edu, like you see over here, if we scroll down a little bit under our research section that I'm highlighting here. If you go under research guides, click on that. This takes you listening to all the different research guides that the library has available, which are kind of text based walkthroughs on how to do different types of research. And since we have a lot of English courses doing these primary source papers, if we go into the English section here, scroll down a bit until we get to P, you can see here, we have a primary sources guide. Now if I click on that, this takes us to our dedicated primary sources guide where we kind of catalog a lot of different primary source databases that are available for use. So each of these are going to have items that vary a bit in format. The database itself might vary in functionality, and you'll also see things that are very historical in nature. So a lot of items dating back, we've got some databases all the way back to around the 1600s or so. So kind of keep those date ranges in mind when you're doing a project. So one I want to show you real quick is if we're on these general starting sources on our homepage here. A lot of the databases we have outlined here are pretty good for a wide range of topic because they don't cover a specific subject matter. I'll show you what one of these looks like under our historic newspaper section. We scroll down to the bottom. This ProQuest historical newspapers. This is a very good one to pull a lot of different primary sources really quickly. And it covers a wide range of topics. So chances are you can type in the search here and it'll get you at least something that you could probably use on your paper. So I've clicked on it and it opens up right here onto a basic search field. I want to start off at the advanced search, which you can click up at the top here. And over here you can see I've already started a sample search up here for you guys. I'm going to try running a search for the term coffee. And I'm doing it in the date range for say I'm interested in the history of coffee in the 1960s. So down here you have a publication date and you can select specific date range and it gives you the fields where you can select January 1, 1960, December 31, 1969. And what this is going to do is it's going to search a lot of American newspapers dating between the range of 1960 to 1969. So I'm going to run a search here and we're going to see what comes up for coffee because I drink a lot of coffee and I'm very interested in that topic. So over here you see we've got 329,031 results and all these dating in the 1960s range and we've already got a lot of good results coming up. So we've got cool ways to drink coffee, talking about London Fogs, iced coffee rum, those sorts of things, choosing a coffee pot. So if you're interested in appliances in the 1960s, this could be something potentially good for you and a lot of different recipes, all sorts of things are coming up. And of course on the left, generally when you do a search, since I already had this one prepped up, you don't have that problem. It'll organize your results by date newest. When that happens, you might not see your keywords highlighting up in the title or the description abstracts and things like that here. So you want to switch it to relevance so that those more relevant items are elevated to the top of your search string. I'm going to say I'm interested in looking at this one to show you what it looks like here. I click on that and it gives me a full what should be a PDF scan of an actual newspaper. Of course this is from the Washington Post Times Herald. And we have a lovely little PDF of a newspaper article. And under the abstract details section, if I go there, want to save this item later on in the long run. If I go down here, you've got a document URL where you can copy this and save it so that you can come look at it later. So this is ProQuest Historical Newspapers. It's probably familiar to anyone who's done kind of other database searching. It's got a lot of good functionalities. You've got your date rangeability modifier here. And it's a very user friendly database. So it's one that I like to highlight a lot for these primary source papers. Of course, a lot of the primary source databases that are available are not going to be quite as user friendly, maybe lacking in certain areas of functionality. And I'll show you what I mean when we go back to our primary sources guide here. So of course on the left hand side, you may have noticed we have a lot of different topics outlined here. Of course, I'm using the search example of coffee and I know that that's kind of related to food, right? People tend to drink coffee, have beverages, maybe have it with breakfast, things like that. So I'm going to click on food and now we have a lot of databases that are specific to the topic of food. So if you're doing any kind of thing on, say, maybe the history of corn in the United States or something like that, this might be a good place for you to look. I'm going to open up two databases from this list. One is this National Agriculture Library digital collections, because I know that the National Agricultural Library has some stuff on coffee. And I'm also going to go into this cookbook section. And I'm going to open this feeding America source here. And I'll show you kind of the differences in what these look like. And I don't want to take a survey at the moment. Now I'm at the National Agriculture Library database from the United States Department of Agriculture. Of course, this is a government database that focuses on agriculture in the United States. And for anybody who doesn't know watching this recording later on the line, there's a lot of things on growing coffee related to the United States that the United States Department of Agriculture oversees. So that's why you probably be able to find some good primary sources in here. And I'm going to run just a basic search up here for coffee. And you can see I don't necessarily have the same advanced search functionalities that we have for pro quest historical newspapers, but I'm going to run the search and see what we've got. And on the left hand side, this is when I can filter to my publication years, and you can see a lot of things coming up in here aren't necessarily particularly too old. It's 2020 so if you need a resource that's older than 20 years is 2001 2005 2007 not really going to cut it, but we do have one thing showing up and we don't want to discount that one thing because it could be pretty interesting. I'm going to click that one. And you see we've got this government document of experiment station work, and it says it's got a section on coffee substitutes there. So I'm going to open this. We've got our option to download a PDF is over here. Click there. And once again we're going to be getting a digital microfilm PDF scan of this government document. I've got some time here I know I'm interested in coffee. Gonna run a search here coffee substitutes on page 22. And I go over here coffee substitutes and we got a little report on the USDA from 1900s and it talks a bit about the health benefits are negligible health benefits of coffee saying that it doesn't provide a lot of caloric intake. It's not necessarily the most nutritional item but people like it a lot for the caffeine, and it also goes over some potential substitutes that can be domestically grown for coffee in the event. We're not able to get the good stuff from like South America for example. And one of them this was interesting to me on this page particularly as it talks a bit about creating this corn coffee, which sounds a little disgusting to me but I'm sure it would work at times were hard right. It's a good place for you to check. But you can see here kind of a difference would then went then when we were looking at the newspapers. It's formatted a bit differently because it's a government document. So this is kind of another area where the type of item you're looking at is going to come up as well as looking at those date ranges because of course we noticed didn't have a lot available necessarily through this resource. We did have a couple of things and you might find yourself going to a lot of different primary source databases picking maybe one or two things that you're able to find and piecing a bit of a story together using those resources right. So that is the Department of Agriculture Library. The next place I want to show you is this feeding America that I clicked on earlier on the primary source guide and just a backup that's on the food section cookbooks feeding America on the primary sources guide that we have. So the food section of America is a collection of resources from the Michigan State University that has a just bunch of different stuff related to food beverages all sorts of things if you've got a food related topic, definitely a good place to check. I'll do my search for coffee here. And this database you can see gives me a bit of an autocomplete where it shows me some different subject headings that might be good searches for me to do. And that's a handy thing here that you might not see in some other databases differences in functionality yet again. I'm just going to do my standard search for coffee. And we'll see what comes up. And right off the bat we're getting a much wider spread of results than we were in the Agriculture Library 14,000 things where coffee is showing up basic properties of coffee from 1959. That's some metabolism so something more medical oriented image of a coffee roaster. Let's look at that one. So over here, you see, we've got an image of an old coffee roaster. The date is actually estimated here because they don't know the exact date that this image comes from that happens a lot with primary sources as well, where the way these come to be is somebody kind of donates an item to a museum. And now that items become a primary source for research purposes right. However, the person who donated the item doesn't necessarily know when this item came from. So they give a bit of an estimate where maybe some historian looked at it and was like, I know these kinds of coffee roasters were in circulation around this time period. So this one probably early 1800s early 1900s. If I click on this here, it's just got me a nice standard image that I could search and you can look at this and try to make some sense of it and use it to draw some inferences about maybe the types of materials that they were using to create coffee strainers or whatever. You see it's kind of crank action as well, which that might have some insight for you there. But another potential item that you could use that's not necessarily text based in nature. Suppose you found an image of an old coffee pot from the 1960s even that something that you could probably use as a primary source. So that feeding America resources definitely a good place to check out. And going back to our primary sources guide, of course, I've kind of showed us the general starting places in the home section we got all these different topics outlined here, but it's possible that the topic you're doing isn't necessarily covered by any of the ones in here. And I'm going to show you a couple of techniques on how to find something in the event you run into that issue. So we're still going to run off my coffee example and I'm going to show you. We're just going to go to Google, which is a surprisingly good place to find primary sources if you know a couple sets of phrases that can help you pick up things really easily. So I'm going to run a search here, of course, we can always do a search for coffee right and that would bring us up maybe some Wikipedia article that you wouldn't necessarily want to use. Maybe you could find some citations at the end of it that you could find some good resources, but I'm going to show you a couple key keywords here. So of course, with primary sources, they tend to be historical in nature. So I'm going to do coffee. I'm going to do history. I'm going to do the term archives. Now archives are historic in nature. There are places that tend to store a lot of different manuscripts and things like that. And it's a keyword that you can find a lot of different digital repositories online that have primary sources of materials. So I'm going to do coffee history archives run a search there. And when you're doing this, you want to be a bit careful of where you're pulling your resources from. Okay. You want to be on the lookout for dot gov sites maybe dot edu sites, something like this national coffee blog might not necessarily be the most credible or reputable source it also might not be so easy to site. However, we go down here, we see this folders coffee calm. The folders coffee brand actually has their own corporate digital archive that you could look at. So if I open this up, go here. They have it kind of broken down by year where they have some materials from the 1930s. You've got photo depicting some people working at a folders plant back in the 1930s 1960 new packing plant opened up and they got an image of it that you could use scrolling down. You can see all of the different containers that they've had in the past. So, and also some advertisements will probably show up in here. So it's a very good resource if you are doing, you know, maybe advertisements in the 1940s this one right here has a nice little or their packaging looks like in World War two they specifically updated their packaging in order to conserve metal. So that's pretty interesting. Maybe you're interested in World War two rationing is your topic could use something like this. And this isn't a place that's relatively credible. You can tell just on the basis that it's folders it's their own corporate archive, but of course be careful when you're finding just random blogs on the internet that have these images and things as well. You want to try to find the original posting of it, so that you can have a good credible citation. Now, the term history and archives, those are good ones to put on your Google search. But there's another one that's really good, and it's digital collections. This is what a lot of libraries have called their online repositories over the years so when you run a search for this it pulls up some different things where we've got some stuff this one's from the National Library of Medicine. You got one showing up from the digital collections at New York Public Library which is a very good resource that has a wide range of topics on it. And it's just an automated search for coffee in that database. I'm going to open it up here and show you what it looks like. So over here we've got 550 results and a ton of different stuff things on coffee plantations, a gentleman named General John coffee who might be related to the plant, the coffee plant somehow you've got advertisements are going to show up in here. This one here, something related to Portugal and coffee. So a lot of different resources are going to show up in here even some maps, things like that. There's a lot of different places to go. But yeah so always remember that if you find you have a topic that isn't quite covered by our primary source guide, try breaking it down to what the general topic area is, and use those keywords of archives for digital collections and Google, and you might be able to find some stuff that you wouldn't otherwise notice. And that's all I've got on that, and I'll hand it back to Amber for closing remarks. So speaking of digital collections and archives, there was one other two other things that I wanted to show real quickly before we end here. So this primary source guide is excellent. It's one of my favorite things, especially for primary sources because they can be tricky. And so we've got the different types of sources you can find here but if you go to related guides, you can actually see we've got one for you to use special collections. And they've gone through and digitized a lot. And so down here a digital teaching collections by click this. And this one is specifically for or was put together with English 102 students in mind. And so it's got several of our different digital collections but it also has our primary sources, organized by common themes that they say in English 102 classes. And so this can be a good place if you are researching something regional to like Knoxville or Tennessee and you want to see what connections we have to it or the university in particular. This can be a good place to go. Another resource I wanted to show you really quickly is, I know I said primary sources can you can get a little squidgy, you know, is it primary is it secondary. And we do have a great tutorial that can help you kind of practice determining what type of source it is. So if you're back at the library's homepage, I can go down to tutorials. It's a little bit. I've got this primary versus secondary source tutorial. It's very quick. It's fun. I've played through it a lot of different times. And if you're still not sure how to tell the difference between the two, this tutorial can be a great place to practice. And with that, that is all we've got for you. And we would greatly appreciate it if you all would fill out our survey here. Just a couple of quick questions about the workshop today. If you require attendance for this workshop and filling out the survey will give you that. And we would also like to invite you to join us next week. Same time to 30 where we're going to talk about where to go for secondary sources. And we're going to go ahead and stop the recording now so we can answer any questions anybody has.