OU Archives and Primary Sources

Teaching with primary documents encourages a varied learning environment for teachers and students alike. Lectures, demonstrations, analysis of documents, independent research, and group work become a gateway for research with historical records in ways that sharpen students' skills and enthusiasm for history, social studies, and the humanities.

Primary sources are the raw materials of history — original documents and objects which were created at the time under study. They are different from secondary sources, accounts or interpretations of events created by someone without firsthand experience. Examining primary sources gives students a powerful sense of history and the complexity of the past. Helping students analyze primary sources can also guide them toward higher-order thinking and better critical thinking and analysis skills.

Help your students think through primary source documents for contextual understanding and to glean information to make informed judgments. The first few times you ask students to work with primary sources, and whenever you have not worked with primary sources recently, be sure to model careful document analysis. Direct students’ attention to the procedures involved and the kinds of questions you ask about the documents. After several instances of modeling, ask students to work as a class to analyze documents, vocalizing the process as they go. Eventually, students will internalize the procedure and be able to go through these steps on their own every time they encounter a primary source document.

Making Archival and Special Collections More Accessible represents the efforts of OCLC Research over the last seven years to support change in the end-to-end process that results in archival and special collections materials being delivered to interested users.