Visual Arts and Art History: Primary Sources

Many books contain collections of important primary sources or documents.  To find these, try searching the UFV Library catalogue for your subject and the term "sources". For example:

• greece and sources
• rome and sources
• middle ages and sources
• renaissance and sources
• art history and sources

Primary sources are original objects, documents, data or firsthand accounts.  They are documents or records that contain firsthand accounts or original data or research on a topic. They are created around the time of the event, or by the persons involved in the event. Primary sources may be reproduced in a secondary source, such as a book.

Examples of primary sources include:

• Plays, poems, stories, novels, original manuscripts, scripts
• Photographs, paintings, drawings, sculpture, musical scores, posters
• Letters, speeches, proclamations, treaties, laws, diaries
• Eyewitness reports, newspaper reports, autobiographies, memoirs, radio and television news transcripts
• Blogs, comments on chat groups or listservs, e-mails, Facebook pages, webpages, Twitter
• Artifacts, relics such as:  menus, forms, advertisements, logos
• Television programs,  audio recordings, video recordings, films and film footage
• Original research: interviews, surveys, lab reports, observations, raw data
• Statistical data, census data
• Court transcripts, conference proceedings, minutes, some government documents

For more details see:

Secondary sources analyze, synthesize, summarize and interpret other sources, including primary sources. 

Examples of secondary sources include:

• Journal articles (unless reporting on an original research study)
• Magazine articles
• Newspaper articles (unless reporting on an event at the time it occured)
• Most non-fiction books
• Biographies

One of your best bets to find original art, artifacts, manuscripts, costume and other primary sources are museums, galleries, and archives. Examples include: