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Primary & Secondary Sources

This guide will help you learn the difference between primary and secondary sources in various subject areas and provides resources for locating primary sources, both in the library and on the open web.

Medieval History Resources

The Digital Scriptorium is a growing image database of medieval and renaissance manuscripts that unites scattered resources from many institutions into an international tool for teaching and scholarly research. It bridges the gap between a diverse user community and the limited resources of libraries by means of sample imaging and extensive rather than intensive cataloguing. 

Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts designed to enable users to find fully digitized manuscripts currently available on the web.

Medieval Manuscripts on the Web Access to various digitization projects on the web.

Harry Ransom Center Medieval and Early Modern Manuscripts Collection Contains 215 medieval or Renaissance manuscripts that date between the 11th and 17th centuries.

Early Music Online The Early Music Online project has digitised 300 of the world’s earliest surviving volumes of printed music, using copies in the British Library, and has made these freely available online. Digitised version of about half of the British Library’s holdings of 16th-century anthologies of printed music, as listed in RISM B/I (Recueils imprimés XVI-XVII siécles). These volumes contain approximately 10,000 musical compositions, which have been individually indexed. The volumes mainly consist of partbooks of vocal polyphony, but also include some early printed tablatures for keyboard or plucked string instruments. They include music printed in Italy, Germany, France and England.

Getty Search Gateway The Getty Search Gateway allows users to search across several of the Getty repositories, including collections databases, library catalogs, collection inventories, and archival finding aids.This tool is designed to help researchers, scholars, and educators discover the variety of resources available across the Getty's collections, which include collections in each the four programs: the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Getty Conservation Institute, the Getty Foundation, and the Getty Research Institute. Users can use the tool to browse our collections broadly, by type of resource (i.e., paintings, books, archives), or to search directly for assets related to very specific subjects—historical periods, artists, object types, etc.