Why Primary Sources are Important

Working with primary sources allows researchers to expand their knowledge, skills, and analytical abilities. When dealing directly with primary sources, researchers engage in asking questions, thinking critically, making intelligent inferences, and developing reasoned explanations and interpretations of events and issues in the past and present.

 

What you miss by ignoring primary sources:

 

• If you ignore primary sources, you are relying on someone else’s interpretation of events; your interpretation of these events may be the same, the same for some events or causes and different for others, or completely different.
• You may miss the threads of several activities going on simultaneously or leads that take you elsewhere.
• You may miss the nuances present in the records, such as communication patterns (e.g. who is copied on the correspondence; who is on the distribution for minutes and reports; whether the language is formal or informal, and what this might tell you about the relationship of the people, etc.).
• You may miss being exposed to multiple points of view.

 

For more information on conducting research with primary and secondary sources, please consult this research guide, created by Kelvin Smith Library librarians.