 Here's a quick overview of what we're going to cover in this video. You'll learn about primary sources and why they are important and useful for teaching, learning, and research. You'll learn about primary source collections available through Western Library's Heritage Resources, the archives and special collections at Western. You'll learn how to search for and access materials available in the collections of heritage resources, both physically and digitally. You'll learn tips and what to expect while doing research with primary sources, particularly in archives and special collections settings. So what are primary sources? Let's start with some basic definitions for the kinds of sources we'll be discussing. Primary sources are materials in a variety of formats created at the time under study that serve as original evidence documenting a time period, event, people, idea, or work. Secondary sources, on the other hand, are one step removed from primary sources. They add a new layer of interpretation and analysis, often by bringing together many different primary sources in order to explain something more fully. Occasionally, a secondary source can also be a primary source. For example, a U.S. History textbook published in 1900 could be used to study not only earlier events, but also people's views of the past at the turn of the 20th century. Primary sources can be printed materials such as books and ephemera, manuscript and archival materials such as diaries, ledgers, and institutional or organizational records like memoranda, reports, and studies. Audiovisual materials such as recordings or films, artifacts such as clothes or personal belongings, or born digital materials such as emails or digital photographs. Primary sources often refer to archives and special collections, which include rare and original materials that are preserved because of their historical or legal significance. They may include documents or objects that warrant special care due to their age, condition, value, or uniqueness. Why are primary sources important and useful for teaching, learning, and research? Imagine you are an archaeologist. You can't just walk into a city from 3,000 years ago and start studying it. First you have to dig it up out of the ground. Then you start piecing the evidence together to form a picture of what life was like at the time. There are countless untold stories waiting to be discovered. Primary sources can also add greater depth and nuance to stories we thought we already knew. At the same time, they are a way to build on, verify, or revise the conclusions of previous researchers. From a teaching perspective, working with primary sources is important because it helps students go beyond simply being consumers of information to actively and critically engaging with the meaning and significance of a source. Because primary sources lack the layer of interpretation found in secondary sources, students have to discover a source's significance for themselves and not just take someone else's word for it. Primary sources are an opportunity for students to experience course material in a hands-on, active learning environment and to directly encounter objects from other time periods and world cultures and to find inspiration for creative projects. Working with primary sources also introduces budding researchers to important questions like how do you form a historical argument from scratch? In other words, how do you take individual sources, possibly ones that have never been studied before, and plug them into a larger framework? Or how do we interpret historical sources at more than face value? For example, is a map only a way of showing what a city's streets looked like a hundred years ago? Or can you use it to study something bigger, like race, gender, class, or maybe something like the history of health or food? In many cases, you can. What should a researcher consider in terms of reliability of historical sources? How does a source's origin affect its interpretation? Does it matter who created the source and why they created it? With primary sources, it is important to consider not only the information and its source, but also the information that is not included. How do you synthesize information from a variety of source formats, including non-textual ones such as photographs, artwork, and ephemera? When there are no words to read, what do you do? Primary sources invite us to immerse ourselves in the visual and material culture, not just the written and spoken words of times gone by. So now you might be asking, where can I find primary sources at Western?