Primary Source Material

Although primary source material is harder to find than secondary, it is now much easier to locate such material because of he electronic sources like the Internet and databases. To be regarded as primary source material , it must come (in any format) from the person who was the original discoverer or inventor of the material in question. It is a report by someone who discovered or invented the material, rather than a report about such a person or about such material.

Although a great deal of this material is available on the Internet, frequently, one must "drill down" to find it. Indexed sources such as Yahoo have some of this material because their indexed sites are hand-selected by people knowledgeable in each field. However, care must be taken to ensure that the information provided is actually primary, and not secondary material compiled by a publicity or public relations person on behalf of the original researcher. Frequently this distinction is difficult to ascertain.

Secondary sources are very good for finding leads to primary source material or people doing primary research in and area. Names and literature sources are frequently cited, University department personnel are frequently named with annotations as tot their research specialties and current interests, and groups and organizations critical to the mainstream flow of some topics can be a great source of leads. Search engines, especially ones with superb algorithms for priorizing the sites they select for display (like Google, originally developed at Stanford University), help to filter out the best of these secondary sources, in order to locate desired leads to primary source material.

Listings of listserves are also of use in locating current experts in a field, or finding someone who is aware of the whereabouts of such experts. Access to these lists is usually quite simple, and one need not remain a participant indefinitely. Serious inquiries are usually responded to in kind.

Boles, in his book on researching Job opportunities , (What Color is Your Parachute?, has a superb article [] on appropriate etiquette for approaching primary source people for information. Two essential principles of etiquette peculiar to the research task from Boles point of view are:

• not to bother people at higher levels of any organization or enterprise with questions which can be answered at a lower level, []and
• maintain the oscillation between literature and people throughout the research process, do not just shift to people - it wastes their time, and reduces their co-operation.[]

  One aspect of primary research which I have noticed is that researchers are prone to the same foibles as the rest of humanity. The are quite capable of what _____[]refers to as "ransacking" an academic library in the same way others ransack the Internet for information. If primary sources are being used to show connections between what one has found and the work of other researchers, one must take care that such connections are in fact worthy of consideration. The researcher's own primary material may be of very high quality, but the connections that are made between the new information and that of others may not be of such a high quality.

  One of the benefits of formal training at the post-graduate level is getting to the place of being able to ask the right questions of primary researchers and understand a bit more of the answers they give, in one's area of interest. It is then easier to move forward on ones own research in the light of such information.

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