Meetings with my librarian colleagues are usually quite amicable. Except when it comes to what makes something a primary source. Then the clashes start. I'm not kidding. There have literally been arguments where voices are raised as we've wrestled with this question as a group. I thought about those lively discussions when I recently realized that my own definition for what makes something a primary source had changed.
For the last couple of years, I had used two resources to shape my definition of a primary source. The first is from the Library of Congress. One description it gives is that primary sources are "original documents and objects created at the time under study." It also goes on to read that "They are different from secondary sources, accounts or interpretations of events created by someone without firsthand experience." The second source contradicts that somewhat. In a podcast episode from Creative Learning Factory, they focus on newspapers being a primary source. With many articles not being written by someone with firsthand experience, can we consider these primary sources? The podcast takes the position that "primary sources are either an eyewitness account or an artifact of its time." To me, if I wanted to know what a greater community would know of an event, a newspaper article would qualify as a primary source of that question.
Earlier this year, the students did an activity where they analyzed primary sources of scientists notes and writings to investigate how they organize their work and their thinking. The sources were from all different time periods and a variety of scientists. Students recognized organizational strategies of these scientists and connected them to their own writing as elementary student scientists.
During other activities where I had utilized primary sources with students, there was a focus around a date, year, or range of time. We used primary sources to focus on colonial times, the building of a American symbol, or the time when a famous individual was alive. There was a beginning date and ending date. Even when we would focus on events like Thanksgiving or Halloween, the date would be important. What was Thanksgiving like 70 years ago? How did they celebrate Halloween 100 years ago? I could even attach specific dates to these types of investigations, and more importantly, many times the dates were important for us to compare our lives with those of others or to put it into a chronological context for our understanding.
With our activity about scientists and their notes, that specific date didn't seem to matter. Instead, the moment in time mattered, that moment when the scientist was writing down his or her ideas, questions, or observations. While we had information on when those moments took place, they weren't important to the analysis of the primary source or the understanding that they were working to come to. Students didn't need the date that Alexander Graham Bell wrote about his experiment to come to understand how he decided to record his ideas and they didn't need to know the year that Leonardo da Vinci drew illustrations of a bow to compare his method to theirs.
Is this new viewpoint unique to using primary sources in certain science settings? I don't think so, but it was what moved my thinking forward. I think the same idea of a primary source not being attached to a date, but a moment in time would apply in the work our fifth graders have done when using primary sources to define geocentric and heliocentric models of the solar system. What made those resources primary sources in that case wasn't the year they were created (although you could have done another activity with that being an important factor) but that these images were products of moments when these scientists were creating or defining either a geocentric or heliocentric model of the solar system.
I realize that this original misconception was not caused by a faulty definition by the Library of Congress or a misspoken idea in a podcast. It was my interpretation of those things that was flawed. To me, that word "time" in the definitions originally meant that date or date range or era. What I failed to think about was about "time" as "moments" Those moments could be scattered over years, decades, or centuries. And artifacts could have been created in all of those moments that are connected, not by the date, but by the activity or intention by the creator of the artifact at that moment.
I'm sure that my working definition of a primary source will continue to evolve over time. For now, I am looking forward to that next spirited discussion with my fellow librarians.
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