Library Psychology 338

If you are having difficulty getting started, you might refer to this document that has a few places to look for nearly every topic mentioned in class. This is by no means comprehensive, but it provides some potential strategies for finding primary sources on your subject. 

• American Presidency Project
  Online collection of over 100,000 documents related to the study of the Presidency.
• Congressional Publications
  Note that you can search by the member of congress.
• Marx & Engels Collected Works
  Definitive English language edition of Marx & Engels writings (1835-1895) including complete correspondence and newly discovered works.
• PEP (Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing) (1871 to present; 3 year full-text embargo)
  Complete text and illustrations of 49 journals in psychoanalysis, 96 classic psychoanalytic books, and the full text and editorial notes of the 42 volumes of the standard editions of Freud.
• Sixties: Primary Documents and Personal Narratives 1960-1974
  Resource brings the 1960s alive through diaries, letters, autobiographies and other memoirs, written and oral histories, manifestos, government documents, memorabilia, and scholarly commentary.
• Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice (1490-2007)
  Thousands of pamphlets, books, paintings, maps and images documenting the varieties and legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective, and the continued existence of slavery today.
• Stalin Digital Archive
  Primary source materials from Stalin's personal papers and monographs on communism. Includes Russian State Archive of Social and Political History documents and the Annals of Communism series.
• Vietnam War and American Foreign Policy (ProQuest History Vault) (1960-1975)
  A collection of primary sources covering everything from early U.S. involvement in the region up to the final resolution of the war at the Paris Peace Talks and the evacuation of U.S. troops in 1973

Other examples include: 

Civil Rights Digital Library

Genius.com

Marxists Internet Archive

Virginia Military Institute Archives

Secondary sources will likely give you clues as to where an individual's archival collections might be found, but you can also search for common phrases such as: "digital collections", "papers", "archives", or "finding aid" (a finding aid is a description of an archival collection). 

Using the Advanced Search option in the Five Colleges Catalog, start by entering the individual's name in the first search box. You can copy and paste the following into the second search box as "Subject Keywords" [the 'or' between terms allows the catalog to search for any of the terms, not all of them]. "archival resources" or archives or correspondence or diaries or interviews or notebooks or sketchbooks or "personal narratives" or photographs or "pictorial works" or sources or speeches 

• American National Biography
  Information on over 17,400 men and women.
• Biographical Dictionary of the United States Congress: 1774 to Present
• Biography in Context
  Nearly a million biographical entries spanning history and geography.
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
  The national record of men and women who have shaped British history and culture, worldwide.

Another handy way to determine where you can find archival materials related to a particular person or topic is to check the sources listed in a biography or other secondary work on your topic. Often the acknowledgements section of a secondary resource will highlight the most significant archival collections used by the author. Typically searching the Five Colleges Catalog for the individual's name as a Subject Keyword along with "Biography" will result in a fairly comprehensive list.