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Other primary sources at Wesleyan
The term 'primary sources,' formerly restricted to manuscripts and other
unpublished materials, today encompasses printed works like newspapers,
journals, and books whose physical attributes convey incomparable evidence about
the times in which their texts were produced and received. As print facsimiles
and microform and digital reproductions become more widespread, growing numbers
of scholars recognize how much can be learned from a textual artifact's
information and aura. (The same holds true, of course, for graphics and other
museum objects.) Preserving and making accessible original textual artifacts is
a principal function of rare book curators.
Although the percentage of these artifacts in Wesleyan's overall library
holdings may be small, the open stacks of Olin and other campus libraries do
include print editions of selected and edited primary materials, some with
titles like Papers, Diary/ies, Letters, Correspondence, or Records. Others,
often including facsimiles, may be found using the keyword search 'Documentary
adj history' or the subject browse 'History Sources'.
The Microforms Center on Olin's lower level is full of riches not (yet) fully
represented in or not easily recognizable from the online catalog. In addition
to Early American Imprints to 1819, many early English and American (including
Middletown) newspapers, and all American fiction to 1900, it houses smaller
groups on topics as various as the Continental Congress, the 18th-century London
printers Bowyer, foreign missions, black abolitionists, dime novels, the Russian
Revolution, and the Manhattan Project. Finding aids for large groups are shelved
to the right just inside the entrance and are worth browsing in.
Several electronic databases available at Wesleyan also have primary source
material. These include Early American Imprints, Early American Newspapers,
Early English Books Online (EEBO), Eighteenth Century Collections Online, and
North American Immigrant Letters, Diaries, and Oral Histories.
Other major collections of primary sources at Wesleyan:
Last updated
09/01/2006
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