Primary Sources as a Vital Part of An Academic Library Collection: The University of Denver Experience

Primary source collections matter because they allow students (at whatever level) to work with original sources and to come to their own conclusions about how events may have happened in the past. This process forces students to think critically about those events, and gives them a grounding in history that can allow them to confidently question interpretations made in secondary sources. Primary source collections are valuable for the greater understanding they give to students about the particular topic they are studying, but perhaps more importantly, they are valuable because they give students insight into how the research process works and confidence to question interpretations made by other scholars. At the University of Denver, we have invested heavily in digital primary source collections from a range of vendors, and our reference librarians have worked closely with our special collections librarians to integrate print and digital primary sources into a variety of humanities and social science courses.