Archives & Manuscripts
Archival material and manuscripts are primary sources. Ranging from
the administrative records of a government department, to the military
service record of a soldier, the business records of a company, a ship's
logbook, minutebooks of a sporting club, letters, diaries, wills, ratebooks...
The material can be available in a number of formats: The original
documents are held in Archives, and in private collections, and in Libraries.
Increasingly copies of the original documents are being published on
microform, and / or electronically, so a trip to the repository is not
always necessary.
Visiting in Person
Accessing the material still frequently involves a visit to the holding
institution, such as:
The
University of Melbourne Archives
The Public Records
Office of Victoria
The State Library
of Victoria
Archives
of Australia
...or further afield, depending on the subject, and scope of your research.
Published guides to the holdings are frequently available, either in
print (check the Library Catalogue), or electronically via the www.
It is usually a good idea to contact the institution first to check
if there are any access restrictions (etc.), especially if you are visiting
for the first time and / or travelling a great distance.
The University of Melbourne Archives
The University
of Melbourne Archives holdings include collections relating to the
University of Melbourne, from its establishment in 1853; covering faculties,
departments, staff and students. The Archives' collections also extend
to other areas of education, business, science and technology, trade
unions and the labour movement, the women's movement, politics and more.
The University of Melbourne Library Special Collections
Special
Collections at the Baillieu Library, include a number of archival
collections related to Australian publishing. The archival collections
(along with other special collections) are accessible via the Special
Collections Reading Room on the 3rd Level of the Baillieu Library. (Restrictions
apply to some archival material.)
Archives and Manuscripts on Microform
Many collections of previously unpublished source material have been
produced on microform, and the University of Melbourne Library has a
large and varied collection. The microform collection in the Baillieu
Library contains collections such as:
Mediaeval & Renaissance manuscript collections
at Oxford colleges
and
Witchcraft in Europe and America
(See section: Identifying Sources: Microforms)
Archives and Manuscripts on the www
Papyri
from ancient Egypt, Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen
Points (written in shorthand), and the Papers
of Sir Joseph Banks have something in common! They are freely accessible
in full text on the www, along with an increasing amount of other archival
material, on the websites produced by major archival institutions and
libraries. You can track down this material either via the websites
of the institutions and libraries themselves, or by searching the web
using a search engine such as Web Crawler. (See section in this
tutorial on Identifying www Resources.)
A listing of the www sites for over 3,000 repositories (Worldwide)
is available:
Repositories
of Primary Sources
Finding Aids
Many institutions make their Finding Aids available, and some have
developed databases covering the holdings of their collections. For
example:
University of Melbourne Archives - Collection of Finding
Aids
National Archives of Australia - items database: Record
Search
National Library of Australia - Register of Australian Archives
and Manuscripts: RAAM
(Covers holdings Australia wide)
Australian War Memorial - Collections Databases
