Chapter five of Envision is all about finding and evaluating research sources. Two sections in the chapter I found helpful and interesting discussed finding primary sources, and searching for secondary sources. Primary sources are defined as original texts a person analyzes in his or her research paper. They can be challenging, but they are easy to find in a various array of places. Secondary sources are texts that provide commentary on a person’s topic and often analyze the texts that person has chosen as primary sources.
Most sources come from original documents, rare books and manuscripts, portfolios of photographs, government documents, and other one-of-a-kind texts. A lot of the time, people work directly with those materials in order for them to perform their own firsthand analysis of that piece of cultural history.
Secondary sources are just as important as primary sources. However, finding them is a little bit different. Most people’s first instinct would be to go to the Internet, but what they really need to be doing is going to a library’s reference area. This area is used to provide people with the foundational sources for a project. These would include basic definitions, historical backgrounds, and bibliographies.
A big thing I struggle with as a writer is how to find sources, other than the Internet, on topics I do research on. I forget things like library databases, which are very easy to get to.
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