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Primary Sources for History

Searching for primary sources

Discover GALIEO and Primary Sources

Discover GALILEO can be a great tool to discover primary sources on your topic. 

Tips for Searching Discover

 

Start Simple

  • First, you need to search for your topic. It can be helpful to start with simpler or broader terms. So if your topic is a person or an event, try searching for the name of your person or event first.  

 

Use Quotation Marks

  • Quotation marks are helpful when you're searching for phrases like an event or a person's name. It tells the database to keep your search terms together rather than looking at each search term individually. 

For example, searching for "World War II" in Discover GALILEO yields 2,031,996 results. 

 

A search for world war 2. the search term has been put in quotation marks.

 

Using Discover to Find Primary Sources

But with the search of "World War II", Discover GALILEO gives us some interesting primary sources to work with.

 

Browsing Videos in Search Results

 

As you scroll down, you should see videos from the Associated Press. If these videos were produced during the same time period of World War II, these would count as primary sources.  The benefit of searching Discover GALILEO for these video sources is that it also provides a citations in APA, MLA, CMS and Harvard. 

 

Examples of Associated Press Videos from the search World War II. Some of these results are from the time period in question and thus would be primary sources

 

Using Publication Date Limiter to Find Primary Sources

 

This same concept works for articles as well. If you look over to the left of the page, you should see the option to limit to a publication date. If you enter the date of your time period, any articles published during the period of your event would also count as primary sources. 

 

Publication Date Limiter is highlighted to reflect that results have been narrowed down between 1939 and 1945, if interested in this time period these could be primary sources.