For Librarians

How to Gather and Analyse Primary Sources for a Research Project

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laptop and books

│ by Kyle Sheldrake, Strategic Marketing Manager – Insight and Development │

Primary sources are a valuable resource in research projects, and digitised primary sources combine two advantages: the speed of identifying sources via targeted searching with having thousands of sources at your fingertips whenever they’re needed. The process of creating our Long Read on the Berlin Wall reminded me a lot of the essay writing process at university, so I thought this would be a good example to explain how to break down the process of gathering and assessing primary source material for a research piece, as this may be helpful to our student readers looking to incorporate primary sources into their essays.

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Why Use Primary Sources?

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archive shelves

│by Pauli Kettunen, Gale Ambassador at the University of Helsinki│

Is the picture above what comes to mind when you think of an archive? Do you believe that, to find any useful information, you must spend weeks between the shelves without seeing daylight?! If so, I have good news for you – Gale Primary Sources has updated archival research to the twenty first century! You no longer have to plough through library catalogues or rummage in endless boxes to find material relevant to your research – you can do so in seconds by running a text search, just like when googling.

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Discovering FDR through Gale Primary Sources

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FDR

│By Tom English, Gale Field Sales Executive – North UK │

I recently enjoyed reading three excellent books on Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR), 32nd President of the United States: Jean Edward Smith’s single-volume biography, FDR, which provides an excellent overview of his life and presidency; David B. Woolner’s The Last 100 Days: FDR at War and at Peace, which gives an incisive and detailed account of the final days of his life, including negotiations with Stalin and Churchill at Yalta and his fight to the end to build international institutions to prevent future wars; and Susan Dunn’s A Blueprint for War: FDR and the Hundred Days that Mobilized America, which tells the story of how FDR outmanoeuvred those who opposed America’s support for Britain and Russia in WWII. 

Having thoroughly enjoyed the secondary sources on FDR, I thought that I’d delve into Gale Primary Sources to see what’s there…

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DH2019 – Lifting the lid on how we created the Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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Busy crowd at the DH2019 Conference in Utrecht, the Netherlands

│By Chris Houghton, Head of Digital Scholarship, Gale International│

It was a real honour for Gale to expand our partnership with ADHO (the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organisations) and serve as Gold Sponsor for their DH2019 conference. This incredible event brought together 735 participants from Europe, 203 from North America, 72 from Asia, 38 from Africa, 11 from Oceania, and 7 from South America. In total, 1066 scholars working in, or with an interest in Digital Humanities, attended, coming together earlier this month in Utrecht, the Netherlands.

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How Gale Scholar helped with my Graduation Thesis

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graduation photo

│ By Wang Ke and Professor Wang Jinghui from Tsinghua University, Beijing │

In this blog post we hear from Wang Ke, a student at Tsinghua University, Beijing, and Wang Ke’s mentor, Professor Wang Jinghui, about how the primary source archives that were made available to the university through the Gale Scholar programme helped Wang Ke achieve high marks in his thesis.

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From Archives to Arguments – a Project Course at the University of Helsinki makes use of the Gale Digital Scholar Lab

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│ By Rebekka Väisänen, Gale Ambassador at the University of Helsinki │

The English Philology corridor at the University of Helsinki has an area which we call the Aquarium, a glass-walled space that is often used for smaller faculty events, informal gatherings, and course “end offs” (the last meeting at the end of a course). On the 17th of April, I arrived there to see the poster presentations for the “Archives to Arguments” course, a module in which students use the Gale British Library Newspapers and other archives to do linguistic research into democratization. 

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Gale Digital Humanities Day at the British Library

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| By Chris Houghton, Head of Digital Scholarship, International Gale Primary Sources |

Thursday 2nd May was a landmark day for Gale which served to illustrate how our relationship with the international academic community has changed over the last decade. After months of hard work, we were delighted to present the inaugural Gale Digital Humanities Day, held at the wonderful British Library. The day featured a packed schedule of talks delivered by academics and librarians from Japan, the US, Australia, the Netherlands and the UK. The audience of around a hundred academics, librarians and students – many of whom had also travelled from outside the UK – enjoyed talks discussing the latest research and teaching innovations in Digital Humanities.

Our changing relationship with customers

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Criminality in Whitechapel – Using Hand Written Text Recognition technology to help examine villainy and justice in Victorian London

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The typed transcript can be examined alongside the original document.

By James Garbett, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter

“Here was the perfect setting for a crime of the blackest sort” states a captivating document about Jack the Ripper that can be found within Gale’s Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920 archive; “a city with a network of winding streets; a city of tumble-down, rickety houses and filthy courts and gateways.” “Here took place,” the source continues, “over a stretch of 15 months, one of the most horrible series of murders the civilised world has ever seen”. Found in the ‘TS Wood Detective Agency Records’ collection, this document paints a terrifying and chilling image of the Whitechapel area of London in the late nineteenth century. It speaks of the labyrinthine nature and depravity of the district, as well as the heinous crimes that were committed there.

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It’s Time to Share the Spotlight: Exploration of Trans Visibility Over the Years

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By Emily Priest, Gale Ambassador at the University of Portsmouth

Today, 31st March, is Trans Visibility Day and, although it is a day to celebrate, it is also a day to reflect on the past to appreciate how far we’ve come. Looking back on trans history and how much visibility the community used to have can be hard swallow at times but it is easy to research using the archives Gale’s Primary Sources. To put things into perspective I used Archives of Gender and Sexuality to compare how society has previously treated trans people with how they’re treated now.

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Exploring Gale Reference Complete from a student’s perspective

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By Tania Chakraborti, Gale Ambassador at Durham University

Writing a humanities essay at university can be a daunting experience; when it comes to primary sources there can either be too few available or, confusingly, too many to choose from! How do you go about sifting through so much material and where do you start? That is where Gale Reference Complete comes in; with over 13 million pages of historical primary sources ranging from the medieval times to present day (as well as reference and periodical content) Gale’s multi-discipline and easy-access resources make sifting through the wealth of information a rapid and enjoyable process. There are several resources encompassed within Gale Reference Complete which support a range of disciplines: Academic OneFile and General OneFile provide periodical resources; InfoTrac Newsstand provides access to more than 2,300 major world newspapers; GVRL is an eBook platform, Archives Unbound is a vast collection of niche primary source archives, and finally Gale Literary Sources is perfect for finding those well-needed critics for your English Literature or Modern Languages essay.

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