Skip to Main Content

Getting Started: Find

Find your Resource

What is considered a resource?

Resources are anything you find to its information for your project. These can be your typical books and websites. But, it can also include journals, eBooks, dictionaries, publications, videos, images and sounds. 

Primary Sources

are original materials on which other research is based, including:

  • original written works – poems, diaries, court records, interviews, surveys, and original research/fieldwork, and

  • research published in scholarly/academic journals.

 

Secondary Sources

are those that describe or analyze primary sources, including:

  • reference materials – dictionaries, encyclopedias, textbooks, and

  • books and articles that interpret, review or synthesize original research/fieldwork.

 

Tertiary Sources

are those used to organize and locate secondary and primary sources.

  • Indexes – provide citations that fully identify a work with information such as author, titles of a book, article, and/or journal, publisher and publication date, volume and issue number, and page numbers.

  • Abstracts – summarize the primary or secondary sources,

  • Databases – are online indexes that usually include abstracts for each primary or secondary resource, and may also include a digital copy of the resource.