Guides: Art: Primary Sources

Subject Specialist

Julie Adamo

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Subjects: Art, Creative Writing

Primary Sources

CRL: Center for Research Libraries Catalog
Online catalog of the holdings of the Center for Research Libraries (CRL), which includes over 5 million items including U.S. and international newspapers; foreign journals and dissertations; government documents, and a wide range of other primary source material. Middlebury's membership in CRL allows us unlimited borrowing of CRL material via Interlibrary Loan (put a note in your request if the item is available from CRL).
Archives of American Art
The Smithsonian Institution's collection of roughly 16 million letters, photographs, diaries, oral history interviews, sketches, scrapbooks, business records, and other documents that support the study of the history of the visual arts in America

Primary vs. Secondary Sources

Primary sources were created at the time of an event or period. They are often the product of an eyewitness or an original creator. They might be original reports of an event, artifacts from an event or time period, or creative works, and include:

memoirs
letters
interviews
pottery
novels
poems

Secondary sources interpret, analyze, or contextualize primary sources. They are second-hand interpretations. They might include:

documentaries
biographies
textbooks
research articles