When looking for primary sources, you need to consider:
- Who would create the documents? Who would preserve the documents?
- Who can be individuals or groups, such as local, regional, or international organizations, associations, and governmental agencies.
- How would the documents be preserved and accessed? Would they have been
- Formally published/produced, such as books, newspapers, magazines, films, music, court cases, etc.? You are likely to find these items in library databases.
- Informally published/produced web documents, such as press releases, reports, policy statements, etc.? You may find recent documents through Google or the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine (going back to 1996).
- Personal or internal documents? If these materials were preserved, they may only be available through visiting private collections, library archives, museums, historical sites, or corporate/organization archives. A national library, public library, historical society, or university/college library may have digitized some of these materials. Interviews and oral histories produced as part of a scholarly research project are often only available from the researcher.
