Personal papers, institutional records, documents, historic photos, and other primary sources are crucial to research in most humanities and social sciences fields. However, these unique materials can be difficult to track down—whether in digital or in physical format--because they are organized, indexed, and accessed very differently from books and periodicals. This session will serve as your personal GPS, helping you find your way to elusive archival and manuscript collections through NUL databases and other resources, and steering you through the next steps of successful primary source research.

The Library's Social Science Data Services (SSDS) assists Northwestern researchers acquire and use data. Participants will learn about tools and services to help identify, access and analyze sources of qualitative and quantitative data. The Libraries subscribes to a number of resources to help you get started, including the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research, Gallup Analytics, ProQuest Statistical Insight, and DataPlanet Statistical Datasets.

Visual information is an increasingly important element in the scholarly endeavor across many disciplines from art to zoology.  This session will teach you about searching, analyzing, and using images in your research.   Included in this session are a primer on digital image standards for projection, printing and publishing; tips on management of your personal image collection; and important information on image citation and copyright within the university, on the internet and in the world of publishing. 

This session will explore resources for oral history projects. Major focus will be on two vast archives of oral history material. The Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation contains nearly 52,000 video testimonies of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust taped in 56 countries and in 32 languages between 1994 and 1999. The HistoryMakers Digital Archive is the largest African American oral video history archive in the world providing access to over 61,221 stories from oral history interviews with 1,195 historically significant African Americans are currently available. This session will focus on accessing and using these resources as well as providing some general information on locating other oral history materials and archives.

Starting graduate school at a new institution means getting used to a new set of resources to assist you in conducting research. The Northwestern University Library has vast electronic and print collections and a plethora of tools and services to help you establish your new research workflow. In this short workshop we will cover NU library basics such as requesting books and articles and accessing e-journals from off campus. We will also introduce you to tools for literature searching, organizing your personal library, preparing manuscripts for publication, sharing articles with your research group, and managing your research data.