The following strategies can be used in Williams library catalog and other library catalogs, such Williams WorldCat (a catalog of over 10,000 libraries around the world) and HathiTrust Digital Library (a digitized collection of materials at US research libraries).
Memoirs, speeches, writings, or correspondence of a person can be found by doing a Browse Search by author using the name (last name first) of the person in the Williams catalog. You can also select the Author field in the Advanced Search in our catalog and other catalogs.
Examples:
Publications and papers of organizations, religious groups, and other groups can also be found by searching for the organization as an author.
Examples:
Search by Keywords
Use the Advanced Search to combine searches for your topic with keywords for types of primary sources. Some keywords to use include:
Examples:
One way to find primary sources is mining the footnotes of secondary sources. What primary sources did the historian use as evidence? If they used published sources, search for those items by title.
Remember, primary sources were written around the same time as an event or during a particular historical time period. To find contemporary writings, you can do searches in the library catalog and limit to the years in question. A word of caution: this search strategy will not find materials that were reprinted at a later date.