Searching collections
What you can learn from this page:
- Why you need to use appropriate historical language
- Why you should search and browse by date
- The importance of searching in multiple places (depending on the sources you need)
Where to start looking
History books are a great place to find historical information.
Books giving historical overviews often republish primary source documents and excerpts and usually also provide extra subject information to help you understand them and the stories they tell.
A book that bring together lots of different primary sources on a subject is sometimes referred to as a "documentary history", "source book" or "historical record".
Library catalogues, subject databases and digital archives will describe their collections in different ways and with different levels of detail. Some content will overlap, other content will be unique (especially true for rare historical archives!).