Welcome

Your assignments at university are an invitation to join a scholarly conversation by exploring topics in depth, weighing the evidence, and drawing your own conclusions.  A good research topic is one that sparks your interest and allows you to ask new questions.

Pick a research topic

• Read your assignment instructions carefully
• Pick a research topic that interests you and meets the assignment criteria
• Identify the key concepts of your research topic and do a search on the library's main search box
  • If you need extra help, click on Choosing an essay topic
• Do some background reading on your topic using Wikipedia
  • Using Wikipedia wisely (video)

Use guides, dictionaries, and encyclopedias to find authoritative definitions, and useful bibliographies.

• Canadian Encyclopedia
• Dictionary of Canadian place names
• Early Canadiana Online
• Encyclopedia of Canada's peoples
• Historical dictionary of Canada
• Indigenous writes : a guide to First Nations, Métis, & Inuit issues in Canada

Writing Guides

• The information-literate historian: a guide to research for history students
• Notes on writing a History Essay (History Department guidelines)
• A short guide to writing about history
• Writing about Canada: a handbook for modern Canadian History
• Writing History: a guide for Canadian students
• Writing the research paper (video)

Begin with the Primary, Secondary and Tertiary Sources overview.

Searching for primary sources:

Search your topic (or historical person of interest) using the library's main search box to find primary sources (or reproductions) in our collection. Keyword searches that include the following terms will identify primary materials most of the time.

• Diar* (for diary or diaries)
• Correspondence
• Letters
• Memoir
• Personal narrative
• Recollections
• Reminiscences
• Journal
• Sources

 Other search tips:

• Use bibliographies and footnotes of secondary sources on your topic to help identify primary source material.
• Useful book: Reading primary sources: the interpretation of texts from 19th and 20th century history
• Original documents can also be found by searching our archival collections or by contacting the Archives and Research Collections (ARC) staff for help. The library has many microform collections of primary sources as well. Please ask for assistance at the Research Help Desk.

Key Sources of Primary Sources for Canadian History

• Canada in the Making
• Canada's Digital Collection (Library and Archives Canada)
• Canadian Historical Association (CHA) Booklets
• CBC Digital Archives

CIHM (Canadian Institute for Historical Microreproductions)

Historical microfiche reproductions from the time of the first European settlers to the 1920s can be searched by entering relevant keywords and adding and CIHM to the search in the library's main search box.

Databases

• Early Canadiana Online (pre-1920)
• Empire Club of Canada (1903-present)
• Empire Online
• Evidence Web
• Hubert Wenger Eskimo Database
• National Film Board of Canada (NFB)
• Peels Prairie Provinces
• Primary Documents.ca
• Toronto's Public Library-Virtual Exhibits

Newspapers

Canadian

• The British Colonist
• The Charlottetown Guardian (1890-1957)http://www.islandnewspapers.ca/
• Globe and Mail: Canada's Heritage from 1844
• Google Newspaper Archive
• Our Future, Our Past

Early Alberta Newspapers.

• Quesnel Cariboo Observer (1908-2015)
• Toronto Star: Pages of the Past (1894-2012)

British

• Times Digital Archive (1785-1985)
• The Guardian (1821-2003)
• The Observer (1791-2003)

Finding primary sources on the Internet

Custom Google Search for Canadian Primary Sources