Primary source

A primary source is a document, recording, artefact, or other evidence created close in time to the events it describes—letters, official records, photographs, datasets, contemporaneous news, or archived web captures—rather than later interpretation.

Vs secondary and tertiary

• Primary — evidence from the period (e.g. a 1998 homepage in the Wayback Machine)
• Secondary — analysis that cites and interprets primary material
• Tertiary — digests such as encyclopedias that summarise secondary literature

Digital caveats

Born-digital primaries can be altered without obvious traces unless fixity and provenance are recorded. Archived copies (Web archiving) are often the best available primary view of vanished pages, with the caveat that crawls are incomplete and may omit scripts or logins.

See also

• Citation
• Archive
• Internet Archive

Sources

• Standard historiography and library guides on source types.
• Rewritten for Foreverpedia practice notes.