AFRS 2160: Archives Guide

During your time as a student, much of your experience with written documents has focused on secondary articles, that have been written from primary documents, and literary fiction. Primary documents require more observation and discovery on your part. 

This tool from the Library of Congress wants you to start with the obvious, asking what you observe about the document, and then move into reflection and questions about the document, the time period it is from, and further questions you might have. This process can help you as a historian pinpoint the questions you may want to ask about the time period about the document. 

The video below works as an example of how to use this tool to work for your Archives paper. 

If you want to get creative with how to interact with the primary documents for your paper, you can use Google forms. For this technique, you will want to work backwards with your document by noting the questions you might want to ask about the document and then using those questions and answers to populate Google Forms. The two videos below will show you how to use Google Forms for your primary documents. 

TPS Community Call Video (Google Forms demo starts at 17:37)