 Hi, everybody, welcome to today's library workshop, Know Where to Go, Primary Sources. My name is Carissa Powell. I use she, her pronouns, and I'm a student success librarian. And I work with a lot of first year composition students like English 101, 102, and you can email me at Carissa at utk.edu. Hi, and I'm Erin Whitaker. I also use she, her pronouns. I'm a commons librarian and I do a lot of research help, research assistance if you've ever used the chat with us function. There's a great chance that that was me. Also, if you ever in the library and come to the front desk, I also spend a lot of time out there too. I also work with programming, like the writing blitz, which is next week, and also de-stress for success and a lot of those other fun events in the library and instruction like today. Okay, so the main things we're hoping everyone gets out of today's workshop is being able to identify different types of primary sources. So we'll be talking about a couple of different things you might be looking for. We wanna make sure that everyone walks away knowing where to look for these on the library's website, how to incorporate that into your upcoming assignments and then making sure that after today, everyone knows how to get help, where to go and that everyone feels really great heading into their assignments. All right, so you may be asking, what is a primary source? Because until I think was well into my college career, I had no idea that such a thing really existed. So you were already way ahead of me by being in this workshop than where I was at your age. So basically boiled down to its simplest form. A primary source is any object, document or resource that originates from the time under study. So it's from the time of the event or situation or like directly afterwards. Another thing to keep in mind is that primary sources are highly contextual. They're things that really only make sense if you know their background or know kind of some information surrounding them. And another fun thing is that sometimes the sources type whether it's a primary source or secondary source, it really depends on how you're using it. So for example, in a lot of cases, like an encyclopedia would be a secondary source. But if you're looking at historic encyclopedias from like the 1800s to see how they've maybe changed over time, then you'd be using those primary sources. So just stuff to keep in mind as you're moving into your assignments with primary sources. And so some examples, I already mentioned that it could potentially be some kind of written thing but it can also be a lot of other things like interviews, speeches, diaries, advertisements, even social media posts, like tweets or TikToks or Instagram reels, maps, letters, photographs, newspaper articles, blogs, news broadcasts or even objects like I like to think of vases or like Grecian urns as very primary sourcey because they can tell us a lot about the people that created them and in what time period they were created in. So when you're thinking about primary sources, it's really thinking outside the box. And here's what some of them look like. There's my absolutely hilarious tweet about the South Knoxville Walmart, which continues to baffle me to this day a fuzzy heart diary that I may be owned in my middle school days, photographs, maps, letters, films, things like that can tell us a lot about what was going on when they were created. All right, so I'm gonna be talking about how to find primary sources. So a couple of first places to look is the primary source database list and all of these things I'm gonna show in just a moment but I just wanted to do a brief overview of them. So we have a whole list of, I think almost a hundred different primary source databases. So there's a lot of different places to go and there's lots of different options. We also have a primary source research guide. So a lot of librarians that help finding primary sources put together a list of our best recommendations. If you're in English 102, it's a really great place to start, especially if you're in a specific section of English 102. So if you're doing like pop culture or food, we have a lot of those databases. And then we also have a digital teaching collections guide. So I will go ahead and show each of these. And you can follow along in chat if you so wish. So first up, I'm gonna show the primary source guide. Just kidding, first up, I'm going to show primary source database list. This is the direct link to it but I'm gonna show you how I got here as well for if you're looking at this after today. So if you're on our library's homepage, which is lib.utk.edu and scroll down to find materials and then articles and databases. This is where all the databases live and then come over here to primary sources. So from here, I was so close, we have 98 primary source databases. There's a few things that are really helpful on this page. One is it accesses a couple of the primary source guides. So you can look on this side of the page and be like, I am researching things from the Civil War. I'm gonna go look there. So those are some things that might be really helpful. The databases that are in this kind of like yellowish box are some good first places to look, especially if you get here. And 98 sounds like a very overwhelming amount of databases to look through. You can look through here and just look at some of these. For finding primary sources, a few things that I really recommend is taking time to look at any of the dates and make sure that the topic that you're researching would be found in this database. So if I'm researching something from the 1960s, that would not be in this database. And so that could be a really easy way to kind of overcome finding nothing in a database, which happens and is also okay. A first place that I really love looking is the ProQuest Historical Newspapers. One, because this goes all the way back to the 1800s. And two, because I just love a newspaper, I feel like it's a really accessible database to look in. And I feel like newspapers are very relatable, like we still have newspapers today. So we're gonna look there. If you're off campus, when you access this, it will ask you to log in with your net ID and password, but I logged in hopefully right before this session. So we should be okay. And the other reason I like this database is that we have a lot of databases through this platform ProQuest. So ProQuest might be a really familiar interface to you. Erin, what's the topic that you're doing for Padlet? I'm gonna try to do a similar search. We are gonna be talking about food today. Cool. I'm just gonna type in food, but here you would type in whatever your topic is that you're looking for. Earlier today, I was helping an English 102 student who was doing Yellowstone National Park. So whatever you're researching, you would type that in there, hit Enter. And my biggest hot tip is to switch from sorted by to relevance. And that is, here it is. All right. From here, this is true for a lot of our databases, but for this one specifically, you could look for a custom date range. So if you know you're researching a specific food trend, you could put those dates in here and really narrow that down. You could also narrow that by type. So maybe you are comparing advertisements about food from a certain time period to advertisements today. So we can narrow that way. And just to give you an example of what something might look like. This is a scanned newspaper article from, it looks like 1930. And this is a really good example that these materials you often need to zoom in in order to read them and that that's okay. But that's just an example of what one might look like. From here, I recommend sending this to yourself either via an email or saving it as a download, but making sure you save it in some format. And then like many automatic citations, I highly recommend double and triple checking them because these are computer generated and you are smarter than a computer generated citation. All right, I'm gonna give a moment to pause for any questions in chat. All right, the next thing I'm gonna show is the primary source research guide. And so this is what I was talking about that has been curated for a lot of students. Not exclusive to English one or two, but if you're doing any sort of research that requires some sort of primary source, this is gonna be really helpful. We have some general starting sources. So again, if you're like, I know I want some sort of image. I wanna cite some sort of image. This is a good place to come. I'm gonna show, we're gonna do art store. This is a very large database. This has about, it said about one million different types of art. And you can see here that in the center, we've got a women's suffrage pageant from 1913. We've got this very interesting item from the Museum of Modern Art. So you could come here, type in food and see what pops up. All right, so maybe Erin earlier was talking about different types of pottery. So maybe here we've got a tripod food container from 1050 BC, 770 BC, so this is very old. It's made out of bronze. There's a lot of like information here to help you look at it. And the thing I really love about art store is that you can zoom, you can get so much closer to an item than you would be able to in real life. And so for images, this is a database. I super love and highly recommend. Similarly from here, you would either download this or copy the specific link. And then again, you could double check the citation over here. All right, any questions about this database? All right, the last thing I'm gonna show is our digital teaching collections. And I put that in chat. So from here, let's see, one moment. There we go, okay. So this is for everything in, it's a guide that highlights primary sources and research materials in special collections. So this is a really great place to check, especially if you're researching one of these topics. So a great place is to come over here and maybe you are researching food. We're gonna really stay within the topic of food today. And it will link to a few things that are digitally accessible to you. So maybe you want to look at some items like this. They have some demonstration work in the South. I'm gonna try to click on that and see where we go. But you can see this photo here, like that was like a canning collection. So maybe you are talking about food in the South in this time period, and this can be a really great place to go. All right, questions about any of these three things, the primary source database list, primary source research guide or the digital teaching collection. So I'm gonna share a little information about how to use a primary source. And these are some tips and tricks collected from a previous workshop we did by a UT library's archivist. They recommended asking questions about the source. So being very curious about the item you're inspecting, so really thinking through some, from a very curious place. They recommend taking lots of notes and photos if you're in person. If you're online, just like any of the databases we just went through, like just thinking about what you're observing, what your first initial observations are. And then being really patient because as some of you might know, primary source research feels very different from finding secondary sources. It just takes more time in my personal experience. It can also be sometimes frustrating at points if you had an idea of what you thought you wanted to find and maybe that thing doesn't exist or it hasn't been archived or it's physically not here. Like sometimes an archive does exist but it's not in Knoxville. And so just being really patient and kind of going on the research journey with your primary sources. The last tip is to ask for help. Both Erin and I work at the library. There are lots of others that work at the library that are very familiar with your assignment, that help lots of people. And so when we end today, we'll also end with how to get help. So an example of some of the things I just talked through when looking at a primary source. So this is one example. So the first thing I would think through is when was the source created? So if I look down at the citation, it looks like this was from 1915. It's important to think about where it was published. So this looks like this was some sort of advertisement. So maybe thinking about where it was published, what kind of magazine was it in? Who was this trying to target? We can think about what this tells us about cultural norms of the time period. So it looks like, and thinking about whose perspective I'm seeing. So a lot of these things thinking through, especially for advertisements, like who was this? Who was the target audience for this? And then for a lot of things, whose perspective is not being shown in these types of materials, especially if you think about archival materials, like who's not being archived. So thinking about whose materials we save. And then thinking about what kind of questions this brings up and where that kind of changes where you're going with your research. And I think that's something that I really think is important and unique about primary sources is that if you remain really open and curious to it, it can really change kind of what you thought you were gonna find and just being really open. Just being really open to where that takes you. So now Erin's gonna kick us off with some practice that everyone can follow along with. We're gonna do some fun thinking about food. So let's all pretend for just a minute that we're writing a paper about people's everyday eating habits in the 1950s. So which of these sources would you use? There's one, it's a cookbook, ooh, it went away. There's one, it's a cookbook titled Now You're Cooking with Tomato Paste and It's Hilarious. There's the advertisement for McDonald's grand opening from 1955, a Copa Cabana menu, which is so festive and so 1950s. And an article titled Frozen Food Selling Well. So which of these do you like? You can hit the little heart button on the padlet if you think these are cool, like I do. Or you can comment anonymously, like why you would use these or what you think we could learn from these about what everyday people were eating or doing in the 1950s, or you can put it in chat, however you wanna do it. Just I'll give you all a few minutes to just look them over. I see somebody else loves the McDonald's ones too. I think that little guy in the picture is supposed to be like a hamburger patty with a sign. I'm not quite sure, but it's like cool and terrifying at the same time. And yes, free parking. I guess that was as big of a deal in the 1950s as it is today. Beautiful colors on the Copa Cabana menu. Yeah, definitely. And I think that you could even do a project about the color usage and advertisements as compared to today or just in the 1950s because those are like super unique colors. Not much has changed from Frozen Food Selling Well. That's true. That's true. I love it. Yeah, I really, I think this is something I really love about Primary Sources is being able that sometimes you realize things haven't changed that much. Yeah, especially with things like advertisements and newspaper as Carissa, when you were showing that newspaper from earlier, like you could go get like a new Sentinel today and the layout would be the same. The headlines like would look so similar. So I think that's a really beautiful thing about certain kinds of Primary Sources is that we can relate to them a lot more than we think we can because I mean, if I saw that Copa Cabana menu, even now I would wanna look at it because it's so eye-catching and I think it would make me wanna snack. So it seems to me like very cheap. Yeah, yeah, because money was so different. You could definitely talk about how prices of food have changed and prices for different types of food have changed. And there are things on there that I don't even, I don't know what rare bits are. I'm just looking at that. I have no idea. But they were popular, apparently, according to this. It looks like rabbit, maybe it's hard to read from here. I would have to zoom in. Welsh rare bit. So you may have to do, and that's another thing with Primary Sources is you may have to get some secondary sources too or do some background research to find out what some of these things mean. He-Man veggies. Yeah, that particular cookbook teaches you how to cook hearty meals with tomato paste like the He-Man vegetable combos. Is that art? Not extraordinary. So yeah, it's very telling about what they were going for. 1950s. So yeah, any other questions or comments about these kinds of resources? Hopefully the show is that primary research can be fun. And then there's a lot out there and lots of different kinds other than just like articles or things like that. There's a wealth of information and different kinds of sources. So if you're not finding exactly what you want in a newspaper article or in an advertisement, don't be afraid to branch out and look at things that you may not have even thought about. And we had been talking about different ways to get help. I know we talked a little bit earlier about the primary source research guide and the FYC research guides in Curris I shared those earlier, but I wanted to reiterate them here that they have a lot of really great information. They have definitions too, that it's not just sources, it's got a lot of like tips and tricks for searching and how to use these things. We also linked special collections website. So if you want to look at any of those digital teaching collections or find something in those that you want to take a look at in person, getting in touch with special collections would be a really great option. They have such cool things down there. And then probably the most important thing that I'm going to leave you with today, maybe not the most important thing, I like to think it's the most important thing is that chat with us button right there anywhere you are and on the library's website. If you feel lost or stuck or confused or a link is broken or you were just hitting a wall, just click that button. And we sometimes it's me, sometimes it's even Carissa or it's one of our wonderful colleagues will answer and we will help you get the kind of help that you need. If we can't do it, we know who can. We're never just going to leave you at a dead end. You can also, if you click that link that live answers link, you can also get other ways to contact us. If you'd rather text or call or send an email, however you feel comfortable getting in touch with us. You can even come to the public services desk in Hodges and try to help you out from there too. Just know I guess the biggest takeaway is that there is help and you're not alone. And we know that primary sources can be really challenging, even still for me. Like it sometimes trips me up too. So you're not alone. All right, and that is it. And if you want to fill out our session survey, there's also the QR code Kentucky too. If you need proof of attendance, it's also at that link as well. If one of your instructors wants you to show that you've been to this workshop. And then this is our last workshop for the semester. But if you want to watch any of the previous ones, they are there on our YouTube playlist. There's also some from last semester and the previous semester. So if you want to see even more different kinds of primary sources than they use, like there's other ones with different themes that you can take a look at to learn more about those too.