Primary sources and the Internet

After reading through chapter 4 of Romano’s Empowering Students with Technology, I was both enthused and annoyed at the same time. I was enthused that people are recognizing that many primary resources which are available are government documents. Another concept that I was excited to see was teaching the value and difference of primary documents. From my experience as a librarian in higher education and serving as judge of the UIL history fair, many students are not familiar with primary resources. I think using resources from the national archives website would be an outstanding resource to work with. However, I was frustrated to see that people are only starting to recognize the value of government documents now that some of them are available on the web. The government documents section of the James G. Gee Library has tons of primary documents in government documents. First of all there is the Congressional Record which provides the speeches which were held on the United States Senate and House of Representatives. There is also the serial set which provides the United States House and Senate reports. This is considered to be on the best resources to find primary resources on our government. The serial set is slowing being scanned in by several companies and it is painstakingly slow. We have a database at the library called U.S. Congressional Serial Set which provides some of the scanned serial set. Resource that we also have in print is the public papers of various presidents. These contain the actual speeches of the Presidents of the United States. I have a handout that contains some of the primary resources available in print and electronic for genealogists at my website. There is a digitization project that is being put forward to scan and catalog the entire government documents collection. This is going to take quite a while to complete. If you are interested about it you can find out what has been scanned and more information about the initiative at http://www.gpoaccess.gov/legacy/registry/. Some other resources that we have which are primary resources and not government documents are the New York Times and other newspapers in microfilm. We also have several databases which contain newspapers accounts from the sixteenth and seventeenth century.

I guess another aspect that frustrated me about the chapter is the lack of knowledge about what is contained within a library. We have tons of these resources available that are not being utilized by students and faculty. This is where I’m going to reiterate again that a partnership needs to be established between faculty and librarians. It is becoming more and more apparent that students and faculty do not know what is available. I understand November’s premise that the concepts of primary resources can be taught by using the national archives website. However, these concepts could be also taught through the use of other resources which are already available in the library. It is simply a lack of communication between faculty and librarians. Universities also need a teacher learning center in which this communication can be fostered.