Research Guides: Master History Pages: Exploring Archive Contents

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Exploring Archive Contents

The guide linked from the "Finding Archives" tab explains how to identify and evaluate appropriate sites. For this assignment, you will need to go one step further. After identifying an appropriate archive, you need to actually dive in, explore the contents, and identify specific items that have value in addressing your historical problem.

Remember that a primary source will rarely use the exact language in your research question. Remember, too, that a primary source may be tangentially related to your topic. That is to say:

You might find an official document created by the organization that you're researching, and it might contain a direct statement which 100% directly addresses your research question. That's a great primary source.
But you also might find letters or photographs which, although they do not make the same sort of direct statement, may nevertheless allow you to draw conclusions or make observations which can support some element of your argument. And those could still be great primary sources.

Bottom line: Don't look for every primary source to be "the" source which can exactly answer your entire research question all by itself. Find bits and pieces of related evidence where you can; just make sure you can explain how they all tie together to contribute to answering the question.

Exploring the Collection: Physical Archives

Obviously, identifying specific information in specific items in a collection will be easier when you have found that collection as a digital archive. How can you dig into the collection like this with a physical archive?

This is where finding aids come in. Refer back to the "Finding Archives" tab if you need a refresher on the concept of archival finding aids.

Let's stick with the idea that we're researching a topic about the sale or transferrance of slaves. You've been doing searches, and you've turned up a reference to an archival collection at Texas A&M University entitled "Slavery/Emancipation Documents." The brief description of the collection indicates that it contains "19 manuscript documents related to slavery, the transference of property, or emancipation in the states of Texas and Missouri."

That sounds promising, but don't just stop there and cite the collection; you want a deeper understanding of what is IN those 19 documents. They might not be digitized, but you can look for a finding aid to the collection. Search a website like TARO (see the "Finding Archives" tab for more details) or go straight to the university's website. Finding aids might also be called "inventories."

Here is part of the inventory for this archival collection. Even though you can't see exact copies of the documents themselves, these descriptions provide you with a lot more detail on which to base a claim that this collection would be valuable to your topic.

Example of an inventory for an archival collection

Exploring the Collection: Digital Archives

Let's say you are working with some topic that involves the sale of slaves between owners in the antebellum south. Following the guidelines from the previous tab, you conduct some searches and you identify the digital archive Documenting the American South from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. You note that this archive contains a sub-collection of North American Slave Narratives. You figure that slave narratives might say something useful about individual slaves being transferred or sold to new masters.

Homepage of the North American Slave Narratives digital collection

That is a good start, but if you simply stop there, you have not yet done enough. You have identified a digital archive which sounds appropriate to the topic, but you need to actually open and read several narratives from the collection. What do the narratives of these slaves say about your specific topic? What light do the individual narratives shed on the historical problem you are investigating? Your annotation ought to identify examples of specific information contained in specific items in the collection that may carry weight for your topic.

Searching versus Browsing:
Keep in mind that searching is useful, especially for text-based documents or items where significant metadata accompanies the digital item. However, for photographs, videos, or collections with little metadata, searching will not be entirely effective. Even when working with text documents, if a document is merely scanned or photographed, but is not transcribed or run through an OCR program (Optimal Character Recognition), then simple searching will not discover words inside the document. It is invaluable to browse a collection as well as search, for the serendipitous discoveries and connections made during browsing are significant.

Note: If it find it extremely difficult to say why any particular source is significant and valuable to your topic, that might be an indication that your topic is still too broad, or that you don't yet understand the background and historiography of the topic well enough.