Primary Sources
The Special Collections Library houses a great variety of formats, including rare books, artwork, photographs, scrapbooks, posters, audio-visual materials, maps, and, of course, boxes upon boxes of paper records. However, our materials share one common characteristic--they are for the most part primary sources.
Richard Pearce-Moses, in his Glossary of Archival and Records Terminology, defines a primary source as: "Material that contains firsthand accounts of events and that was created contemporaneous to those events or later recalled by an eyewitness."
Examples of primary sources: a handwritten letter, a scrapbook page, an historical map.
