What is a primary source?
A "primary source" is the direct evidence or first hand accounts of events without secondary analysis or interpretation. A primary source is a work that was written or created at a time that is contemporary or nearly contemporary with the period or subject being studied. It can include newspapers, various archival documents (business and government records, personal diaries, meeting minutes, manuscripts). A secondary source is a work that comments upon, analyzes, or builds upon a primary source. RBSC is unique mond UBC libraries in that it strives to collect primary sources.
When to consult primary sources?
Conduct research using secondary sources first. Secondary sources will help direct you most efficiently to relevant primary sources. Think of secondary sources as the "bread crumbs" leading you to the goal.
Jim Wong-Chu is a writer, photographer, historian, radio producer, community organizer and activist, editor, and literary and cultural engineer. He was born in 1949 in Hong Kong.
He is a founding member of various community and cultural organizations including: Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop (ACWW), Vancouver Asian Heritage Month Society/explorASIAN, the Pender Guy Radio Program, Asia Canadian Performing Arts Resource (ACPAR), Ricepaper magazine, and literASIAN: A Festival of Pacific Rim Asian Canadian Writing.
Image source: An Afternoon Discussion with Terry Watada, Jim Wong-Chu, and Glenn Deer at the Irving K. Barber Learning Centre, 2014.
Roy Akira Miki was born October 10, 1942 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. His family had been relocated to a sugar beet farm in Manitoba from Haney, B.C. earlier that year.
He was editor of the journals Line (1983-1989) and West Coast Line: Contemporary Writing and Criticism (1990-1999). Some of his major works include Tracing the Paths. Reading & Writing The Martyrology (editor, 1988), A Record of Writing: An Annotated and illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering (1990), for which he won the 1991 Gabrielle Roy Prize for Canadian Criticism, and Saving Face: Selected Poems 1978-1988 (1991).
Fonds consists of correspondence, manuscripts, drafts, pamphlets, academic papers, poems, research material, notes, transcripts, reports, submissions, agreements, minutes, programmes, photographs, and other material. Records relate to Miki’s writing and editing activities, his academic career, his involvement and support of the Japanese Canadian Redress movement, his participation in various literary and cultural events and projects, and his personal life.
Image source: Visiting Scholars/Artists, UBC Okanagan Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies
Helen Potrebenko was born June 21, 1940 on a farm in Woking, Alberta. Her early writing appeared in "Pedestal," Canada's first women's liberation newspaper, and she has published numerous books, including short stories, poems, plays, and novels.
Considered "one of Vancouver's most uncompromising feminist writers," and a self-described "working-class feminist," Potrebenko deals primarily with the realities and challenges faced by working-class women in the 1970s and 1980s.
The collections featured here are results of projects conducted by students of the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia. These projects are developed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the class LIBR 582: Digital Images and Text Collections and represent bodies of digitized materials that form part of RBSC's collections, or are related to RBSC's collections.