Primary sources in undergraduate education: the who, what, why, and where Charlotte Nunes, Mellon Fellow in Digital Scholarship Department of Research and Digital Scholarship Southwestern University

Let’s start with a discussion about questions and answers. Kostas Kiriakakis’ comic A Day at the Park bit.ly/18qxg5s

The Digital Public Library of America The DPLA is a great place to start your search for primary sources related to your research topic. It serves as a hub for digital collections at museums, university archives, and cultural heritage institutions nationwide.

Who should work with primary sources? YOU! Primary sources lend themselves to inquiry-based learning. The Boyer Report and other expert sources recommend an emphasis on inquiry-based learning (constructing research questions; building research skills) in undergraduate education. bit.ly/1OOsHcN

What are primary sources? Primary vs. secondary sources Libraries vs. archives Plenty of overlap, grey areas, and interrelationships between these!

Why should you incorporate primary sources in humanities research? Primary sources provide an incomparable sense of context. Analyzing selected digitized archival materials alongside course content allows you to contextualize course readings in terms of the literary/social/cultural/political networks that influenced the authors, communities, and movements about which you’re learning.

Where can you find primary sources? The Digital Public Library of America ( The DPLA brings together digital primary source collections from museums, archives, and cultural heritage institutions across the country. Therefore it’s a great starting point for digital archival exploration!

Let’s conduct a basic keyword search at Using the search box to the left of the DPLA homepage, conduct keyword searches related to your research topic.

Our keyword search “Black Power Movement” returned 104 results.

Note that you can refine your search using the options to the left of the page. Refine your search by format, contributing institution, date, language, location, and/or subject.

Click “View Object” under a given record to view the object and its complete metadata in the digital collection where it lives. If we click “View Object” here for instance…

We are directed to the complete record at the Brown Media Archive Newsfilm Database.

Need some inspiration? The DPLA homepage has Exhibitions, Maps, and Timelines for you to explore. See items grouped by theme, location, and time period.