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Hi, Welcome to today’s BadgerBite where I’ll show you how BadgerLink can help you
find primary sources.
A primary source is something created during a historical event and can include autobiographies,
diaries, photographs, letters, interviews, movies, newspapers, poetry, fiction,
and other stuff.
The Declaration of Independence is a primary source because it was written during the Revolutionary
War.
However, an encyclopedia entry about the declaration of Independence is not a primary source because
the entry was not created during the Revolutionary War.
Let’s get started by going to the BadgerLink Homepage at www.BadgerLink.net.
First, I want to show you format icons. So I’m clicking on the All Resources page.
The BadgerLink webpage has format icons by each resource. When you see a scroll by a
resource, it means that this resource has primary source documents.
On the All Resources page you can filter the resources by Resource Type. Select Primary
Source from the drop down menu
And then click sort.
All of these resources listed have primary source content.
So let’s go back to the Homepage. One great place to find primary sources is Access NewspaperARCHIVE
because it has historic newspapers.
There are many ways to get to Access NewspaperARCHIVE, but I’m going to go to the Newspaper page.
And here’s Access NewspaperARCHIVE.
You can search by keyword, by name, or by location. I’m going to do a name search
for John Kennedy.
From this basic search I retrieved over one million results! That’s way too many to
go through! So what I’m going to do is use the options on the right hand side of the
page to narrow the results.
Let’s say I wanted find more information about his assassination.
If I put in the day after his assassination, I will retrieve newspapers from that day.
I could further narrow my search by location or newspaper.
That’s a lot better. So I’m going to click on this article to open it. From this page
you have many options on how to view the resource as well as saving and printing.
Let’s go back to the BadgerLink homepage and look at some other resources.
Often, when you are looking for a primary source, it’s on a historic topic. Let’s
click on the History subject tab and see what we have there.
All of the resources on the History page have primary source content.
But let’s take a look at History Reference Center.
To search specifically for primary source documents, you’ll need to click on Advanced
Search
and then limit the Publication type to Primary Source.
Again, type in your subject and click search.
On your results screen, the items in the middle are articles and the items listed on the right-hand
side are related images or videos.
So this looks interesting; I’m going to click on that.
This opens a page that gives you more information about the article as well as where to access
the full text.
On the right-hand side of the screen there are many options, and I want to highlight
2.
First, the Cite button: click on the Cite button and a citation pops up in several different
styles.
You’ll still need to make sure that the citation is correct, but for the most part,
this is a great way to get the citation for an article.
The second button I want to highlight is the Permalink button. When you click on this a
long URL pops up. This is the link you need to save if you want to get back to this article.
There is a temptation to copy and paste the URL from the address bar at the top of the
page but if you use that URL it might not work. This permalink will work!
If you have any questions about BadgerLink, contact us by clicking Help and then Contact
Us.
Thanks for joining us for this BadgerBite; we’ll see you next time.