LibGuides: Foundation Year Program: Find Primary &amp; Secondary Sources

Primary & Secondary Sources

For most of your FYP papers, you only need to consult the main text that you have read -- this is called a primary source. For your Position Paper at the end of the Fall semester, and your Research Paper at the end of the Winter semester, you will need to use secondary sources as well as your main text -- secondary sources are books or articles written about the main text you are working with.

Here are a few examples:

Primary Source: The Divine Comedy by Dante Aligheri

Secondary Source: "The Numerology of Dante's Divine Vision" by Thomas Rendall

Primary Source: Persuasion by Jane Austen

Secondary Source: A Revolution Almost Beyond Expression: Jane Austen's Persuasion by Jocelyn Harris

Primary Source: Battleship Potemkin directed by Sergei Eisenstein

Secondary Source: Harmony and Dissent: Film and Avant-garde Art Movements in the Early Twentieth Century by Bruce Elder

The databases listed below are helpful for finding primary sources:

ARTSTOR This link opens in a new window
The ARTstor Digital Library provides more than one million images with tools for teaching and research. Its collections comprise contributions from outstanding museums, photographers, libraries, scholars, photo archives, and artists and artists' estates from all over the world (read the full list here: http://www.artstor.org/collections). The collections encompass a wide variety of subject areas, including art, architecture, music, religion, anthropology, literature, world history, American Studies, Asian Studies, Classical Studies, Medieval Studies, Renaissance Studies, and more (find sample subject guides here: http://www.artstor.org/subjectguides).
British and Irish Women's Letters and Diaries This link opens in a new window
Includes the immediate experiences of approximately 500 women, as revealed in over 100,000 pages of diaries and letters. The collection includes primary materials spanning more than 300 years. Each source has been carefully chosen using leading bibliographies. The collection also includes biographies and an extensive annotated bibliography of the sources in the database.
Defining Gender, 1459-1910 This link opens in a new window
The study and analysis of gender, leisure and consumer culture has now become one of the most vibrant areas of social, cultural and intellectual research, transcending traditional disciplinary boundaries. This exciting collection of original source material from British and European archives will enrich the teaching and research experience of those studying history, literature, sociology, education and cultural studies from a gendered perspective. Thematic Areas * Conduct and Politeness * Domesticity and the Family * Consumption and Leisure * Education and Sensibility * The Body
Early English Books Online (EEBO) This link opens in a new window
Early English Books Online contains the page-image full text of over 125,000 titles listed in Pollard & Redgrave's Short-Title Catalogue (1475-1640) and Wing's Short-Title Catalogue (1641-1700) and their revised editions, as well as the Thomason Tracts (1640-1661) collection. New content is added to this collection throughout the year.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) This link opens in a new window
Full-text database that makes available more than 155,000 volumes and over 30 million pages of historical works in essence, every accessible English-language and foreign-language title published in the United Kingdom between 1701 and 1800, along with thousands of important works from the Americas.Please note: Library has access to Part One only.
Eighteenth Century journals I & II This link opens in a new window
The Portal to Newspapers and Periodicals c1685-1815 offers seamless, integrated access to Sections I and II of our digital project Eighteenth Century Journals. This Portal brings together rare journals printed between c1685 and 1815, illuminating all aspects of eighteenth-century social, political and literary life. Topics covered are extremely wide-ranging and include: the writings of Sir Isaac Newton; the French Revolution; reviews of literature and fashion throughout Europe; political debates; and coffee house gossip and discussion. Eighteenth Century Journals I contains material from the Hope Collection at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center holds one of the finest collections of 17th and 18th century newspapers and periodicals in the world, and it was from here that items for Eighteenth Century Journals II were selected.

Europeana
Europeana works with thousands of European archives, libraries and museums to share cultural heritage for enjoyment, education and research. This website gives you access to millions of books, music, artworks and more – with sophisticated search and filter tools to help you find what you’re looking for.

Literary Manuscripts This link opens in a new window
An essential research tool for all scholars and students researching Victorian literature. Most of these unique manuscripts are unavailable in any medium elsewhere. They are supplemented by some rare printed materials, including early editions annotated by the authors. Each author collection is included in its entirety, allowing users to browse and search the manuscripts as they would in the Berg Reading Room. Authors represented in this collection include: Matthew Arnold The Brontës Elizabeth Barrett Browning Robert Browning Wilkie Collins Joseph Conrad Charles Dickens George Eliot George Gissing Thomas Hardy Henry James Dante Gabriel Rossetti John Ruskin Alfred Tennyson William Makepeace Thackeray. Researchers and students can trace the close interconnection of these Victorian authors – and subsequently their texts – through the mass of personal correspondence between them, revealing the close circles in which the Victorian literary world moved.
Loeb Classical Library This link opens in a new window
A fully searchable, virtual library of Greek and Latin literature with English translations. Includes epic and lyric poetry; tragedy and comedy; history, travel, philosophy, and oratory; the great medical writers and mathematicians; and, those Church Fathers who made particular use of pagan culture. Users can browse, search, bookmark, annotate, and share content.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new window
A group of digital primary source collections from the nineteenth century, NCCO content includes monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics and more. The NCCO platform allows for searches across different content types and offers annotation and tagging tools. Materials for this program are sourced through partnerships with major world libraries as well as specialist libraries, and will be added over several years.
Past Masters This link opens in a new window
InteLex has been publishing the Past Masters® series of full-text humanities databases. We are focused on the needs of the scholarly community in the human sciences. InteLex assembles and publishes cohesive collections of excellent editions, in both original language and in English translation. Past Masters series includes a collection of full-text electronic editions in philosophy ; significant databases in the history of political thought and theory, education, religious studies, economics, classics, history and philosophy of science, germanic studies and sociology ; a collection of English Letters in electronic form, in conjunction with Oxford University Press and Pickering & Chatto. This collection encompasses the letters, correspondence, and in some instances the diaries and the notebooks of the most significant figures in English literature, letters, politics, the church and the arts.
Women Writers Online This link opens in a new window
Women Writers Online, presents all WWP texts currently available online, covering a period from 1400 to 1850. All of these texts can be browsed, searched, and analysed using tools which provide access to the full XML encoding.