Locating digitized primary sources for a research project can take a bit of finesse. Digitized primary sources tend to be located in collections online, which can be found in various ways.

If you have access to a research library, it will subscribe to many different kinds of databases that contain collections of primary sources. Some of these databases will be quite broad, e.g. collections of major national and regional newspapers. Others can be quite narrow and topic-specific. The George Mason University Library, for example, has primary source collections dealing with historical topics ranging from The Cold War to the African American Civil Rights Movement.

Other useful databases can be located online and may or may not require a subscription or institutional affiliation. Large public entities like the New York Public Library and the Smithsonian Institution maintain online databases of primary sources. Again, each of these databases may contain particular collections of relevance to your research subject; navigating the website and looking for a tab called “Collections” is often a good place to start.

Once you have located a relevant online collection, you are ready to begin searching. Some online collections are sorted into pre-existing categories, often arranged by theme, time period, or the name of notable individuals. You can use these pre-set categories to browse the collection.

However, most collections are too large to examine all of their records individually, even when browsing by category. In addition, one of the major advantages of using a digital collection is that they usually include a search function. The search function not only makes it easier to locate records relevant to your project, but they can also be used to bypass the pre-set browsing categories that may or may not be in accordance with your interests or topic. This is especially true if you are researching a topic that is off the beaten research path, or if your subject may involve coded terms with which professional archivists may not be familiar. (Frydman 2025).

So it is helpful to come prepared with a series of keywords or phrases to search. Be aware that not all search bars are created equal, particularly if you are searching for multi-word phrases rather than individual words. It is helpful to use the “Advanced Search” feature if one is available on the particular search bar that you are using. For example, conducting a basic search for the phrase “George Washington” (in quotation marks) may or may not result in records that contain only the word “George” or “Washington,” depending on how the collection you are using configures its basic search. Using the Advanced Search, however, one can conduct an “exact phrase” search for only records containing the words “George Washington” in sequence, giving more relevant search results.

By way of illustration, I was recently conducting an online search for primary sources relating to the Chicano movement in Sacramento, California. While some collections online specialize in Chicano materials, the vast majority do not. When using the collections that weren’t specific to Chicano history, I began my search – naturally enough – with the term “chicano.” My aim here was to start out with the widest possible universe of potentially relevant records, as I know from my prior experience with the subject that pretty much any primary source article or interview dealing with Chicano politics would likely include that word somewhere, either in the publication name or the article itself. The initial search results might still be a bit too large to comb through one-by-one, but it would give me a narrower base upon which to use more targeted search terms.

Using the general “Independent Voices” periodicals collection on JSTOR, for example, gave me 4,435 results for the search term “chicano.” For further refinement, one helpful starting point was to use filters to narrow the results based upon the time frame that I was most interested in. For my case, I knew that any records earlier than 1960 would likely be irrelevant to my search, since my subject matter did not become a political term of reference until the 1960s. By contrast, when searching the Sacramento Movimiento Chicano and Mexican American Education Oral Histories collection, which contains transcripts of interviews with Chicano activists, I did not start by searching for “chicano” because I knew that term would likely already be included in the vast majority of records in the collection.

Starting from this narrower base, it then helps to search for more specific terms, based upon your research topic. Using Boolean connectors is helpful. For example, if I am looking for records relating to the murals in Chicano Park in San Diego, I can specify in the search that I am searching for records containing the term “mural” AND the term “park” AND the term “San Diego.” Prior research into your subject can inform the particular search terms you will use, particularly if you are researching communities that use a vernacular not widely known or used by the professional archival community.