Primary sources online

State and national libraries are digitising rare and fragile documents and other printed material for use online.

Primary sources like these, which give first-hand accounts of what life was like in the past, are valuable resources for any assignment. If used well, they can give your work a unique perspective.

The State Library of Victoria has digitised hundreds of thousands of photographs, posters, pamphlets, sheet music, paintings and manuscripts. Many of these relate to Victorian history, such as:

• Port Phillip Papers – letters and diaries from the first years of European settlement in Melbourne
• World War I unit histories - descriptions of battles, unit movements and operations taken from diary extracts and letters
• The Football Record (1912-2014) - official VFL/AFL match-of-the-day programme since 1912 including gossip, news, statistics, results and fixtures
• Old Melbourne Street Directories - collection of digitised historic suburban street directories  from 1912 to 1952.

The Library's catalogue also contains over a million digitised photographs, paintings and objects. These, and other digitsed online materials, are a great resource that you can use in your assignments.

Trove

Another useful resource is Trove, a website from the National Library of Australia which lets you search over 400 million items from library collections all over the country.

Not only can you search for books, the real power of Trove comes from the wealth of digitised sources available at your fingertips.

With over 135 million journal articles, 600 thousand maps, 150 million newspapers, almost 20 million books and over 8 million digitised images, Trove is a treasure trove of online sources for study.