Research Guides: HIST 076: Women's Work in Premodern China (SC): Primary Sources Online

Large Collections and Directories of Online Primary Sources

OAIster
Lets you search for materials (including primary sources) that libraries have digitized and made available online.

Search tip: Enter a topic into the search box, and then narrow down your results using the limits on the left side (of the search results page).

These links point to websites that allow for searching across the collections of many different libraries at once. Some (e.g. Internet Archive) also include content that has been submitted by users.

Internet Archive
The Internet Archive includes more than 300,000 texts, as well as audio, moving images, software and archived web pages. A good source for books printed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including many travel accounts.
Europeana
Provides access to 6 million digital items, including books, art work, photographs, newspapers, films and other cultural objects from European museums, galleries, libraries, archives and audio-visual collections including the Bibliotheque Nationale, the British Library, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze.
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The DPLA allows you to search millions of photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Each record links to the original object on the library or other content provider's website.

Finding Primary Sources Online: Chinese and East Asia

East Asia History Source Book
Part of the larger Fordham University Internet History Source Books project, this collection of digitized primary sources related to East Asian history includes some documents that relate to Premodern China.

Empire Online
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Offers images of original documents taken from libraries and archives around the world including correspondence, diaries, literature and illustrations. Includes essays by leading scholars in the field of Empire Studies. Covers a range of topics and includes Africa, the Americans, Australasia, Oceania and South Asia. Includes documents published between 1492-1969.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
Nineteenth Century Collections Online may be useful for students working in the Qing dynasty. This resource offers full-text access to English-language titles and editions published between 1801 and 1900 including books, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more. Explore the collection "Asia and the West: Diplomacy and Cultural Exchange" to find journals written by missionaries in China and other English-language sources.

Women in World History: Primary Sources (East Asia)
This site includes a few transcriptions of missionary journals and other primary source documents pertaining to the history of women in China.

Note that transcriptions of written works offer only the text, versus scanned copies of documents, which may offer images, handwriting, and other elements.

Finding Images and Art

ARTstor
A digital library that provides access to thousands of digital images derived from a variety of museum, library and archival collections. Images support a variety of disciplines including architecture, painting, sculpture, photography, decorative arts, and design. Coverage varies.

Evaluating Websites

It's tempting to start your primary source research using Google, and you might find some great sources that way. However, when you're looking at websites, ask yourself the following questions to evaluate the source(s) you're considering.

Is the author of the website clearly identified? (If not, that's a red flag.) Are they an academic historian? Is the website maintained by a historical society, library, or other institution? What information can you find about this person, organization, or institution?
Take a careful look at the text of the website. Keep an eye out for typos, terminology that has been used incorrectly, and other inaccuracies. On the other hand, remember that a well-designed and well-written site isn't necessarily trustworthy.
Consider using the Wayback Machine to view screenshots of this website over the past few years.
If you find an interesting and relevant document (e.g. an image of a poster, a digitized version of a book) on a website that seems unreliable overall, try to seek out the document from another source. Feel free to ask Sarah, the librarian for this course, for help. (selichk1@swat)