What can we learn about history in our community using primary sources?
This activity has a great deal of flexibility built in to accommodate the items in your collection, as well as community interests.
- Framing: You might frame this activity around a heritage month (e.g., Hispanic Heritage Month, Women’s History Month), or to commemorate a well-known event or tradition in your community (a parade or the opening of an important local institution). Using the framework of your choosing, you can pull a set of primary sources that participants can analyze and discuss.
- Source types: You may choose to pull documents across a variety of source types, or you may choose to pull multiple documents of the same source type; this might be determined by either the sources available in your collection, or you might want to introduce participants to a new source type (e.g., most researchers in your library tend to use newspapers, but you’d like to introduce them to ledgers, oral histories, or maps in your collection).
The sources you decide to use for this program will determine which analysis sheets you’ll use. See the activity sheets that follow.
Activity resource sheet: Primary Source Analysis (docx); Primary Source Analysis (pdf)