Primary vs. Secondary Sources

Discovery Task 4: Digging In The Archives For A Primary Source -- Without Getting Grimy

In this task you will use the Historical New York Times to look for a review of the original production of Porgy and Bess and an article by George Gershwin about the opera, both primary sources to use for insight into the opera and the attitudes toward it at the time. Then you will use one of the Libraries’ databases to find secondary sources on the opera.

Primary source? What is a primary source?

Primary sources are materials that provide direct evidence or firsthand testimony concerning the period or subject under investigation. The definition of a primary source may vary depending upon the discipline or context.


• In the Humanities, in a discipline such as History or English, a primary source could be defined as something that was created during the time period being studied or afterward by individuals who participated in the events of that time.

• In the Social Sciences, such as Sociology or Psychology, numerical data and research results from experiments or surveys are other examples of primary sources.

• In the Sciences, such as Biology or Chemistry, primary sources might be reports on original research or ideas. These are often reported as research articles in scholarly journals.

Historical newspapers are an excellent primary source for investigating events of a certain time period—and in our rapidly growing digital world, many of the major newspapers are available electronically going back to their inception.

Historical New York Times
http://www.umi.com/pqdauto?COPT=U01EPTQmSU5UPTAmREJTPTFBQ0Q@

Or to access the database and see the entire collection of newspaper databases available from the UCI Libraries, follow this path:
From the Libraries’ homepage (www.lib.uci.edu)--Subject Guides--N (for news and newspapers)--Historical newspapers--choose New York Times 1857-1999.

**If you are accessing the New York Times from off campus you will need to connect from off campus.

Do a search for “Porgy and Bess and Gershwin.” You will also want to limit to a specific date or date range. The opera opened on October 10th, 1935, so you will want to search for the reviews that came out on October 11th.

Print out the reviews by Brooks Atkinson and Olin Downes. To print click on the Article Image Pdf. link.
What happens when you view the article on the “Page map”? What could you learn by viewing the article in that form?

To find Gershwin's article you will need to modify your search. Leave Porgy and Bess in the first search box, but this time search for Gershwin as the author in the second search box. You will also need to search all available dates, so clear the previous date limitation. Print out Gershwin's article on Porgy and Bess.

Helpful Research Tips:

You could choose to do a date range search to find all the articles that have been written on Porgy and Bess over a certain time period.

Using the More Search Options tab will allow you to limit the results to a specific type of material such as articles, editorials, editorial cartoons, or letters to the editor. This is helpful when you are searching a large date range.

In most databases, unlike in Google, it is necessary to use the “and” between your search terms, otherwise the computer thinks you are searching for a phrase—porgy bess gershwin will not yield any results.

Secondary Sources

Secondary sources are works that analyze, assess or interpret an historical event, era, or phenomenon, generally utilizing primary sources to do so. To find secondary sources discussing Porgy and Bess use either MLA International Bibliography, to investigate it from a literary perspective, or America: History and Life, for an analysis with a more historical bent.

Both these databases are available from the “Databases To Get You Started” page on the Libraries’ web site: http://www.lib.uci.edu/online/databases_suggest.html

MLA International Bibliography includes indexing for books, dissertations, conference proceedings and journal articles in literature, linguistics, and folklore. For this exercise you should limit your search to journal articles only.

OR

America: History and Life indexes journal articles, book reviews, media reviews, and dissertations on the history of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present. For this exercise you should limit your search to articles.

Do a search in one of these databases for Porgy and Bess. Choose an article and use the button to find where to access the full text of the article. The majority of these articles will be available electronically, but a link is also provided to ANTPAC, the UCI Libraries’ catalog, if the article is only available in paper. Print out the first page of the article.

Important: You must find the full text of the article itself, do not just print out the page from MLA International Bibliography or America: History and Life with the article information.

Helpful Research Tips:

For a discussion of primary sources, what they are and how to find them, check out the UCI Libraries’ Primary Sources tutorial.

is available in most of the Libraries’ databases to link you from a database to the location of the actual journal, magazine or book you are looking for. UC elinks will also link you to Melvyl, the UC-wide catalog and provides a link to Interlibrary Loan, a service provided by the Libraries that will find an article from another library if we do not own it here at UCI.

allows you to cut and paste the citation into your document in the appropriate citation format.

MLA International Bibliography and America: History and Life are just two of the subject databases (remember Philosopher's Index) that you have access to as a student at UCI. The Databases to get you started page provides you with access to some of the more popular databases in Humanities, Social Sciences, and Sciences.

To access the Humanities Core Course Library web page for all the Discovery Tasks and other important links, go to http://course.lib.uci.edu/hu/writing/humcore/ .


Questions, comments, problems? Contact Cathy Palmer, UCI Libraries (cpalmer@uci.edu)