-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: maps as primary sources]] Date: Mon, 8 Sep 2003 15:05:54 -0400 (EDT) From: Ken Grabach <[log in to unmask]> ------------------ The answers to a question like this are often more complex and complicated than the question itself! I would compare maps as primary sources to published government sources, or news articles. These two categories can be both primary and secondary at the same time. Newspaper articles are primary sources to the extent they describe original voices in describing an event, let's say a personal account by a reporter of her experiences of September 11, 2001, in downtown Manhattan. A summary of those events, given in an accompanying article or sidebar, or an analysis of events of the war in Iraq, probably would represent a secondary source. Likewise, a government publication, depends on what it is and whose voice is being conveyed. Statutes, court decisions, and the like are primary sources of a government's law. Something that summarizes, or provides commentary on it, is a secondary source, because the law emanates from a government body, and the discussion of it by someone else or someones else is not. On the other hand, a commentary by a single individual or organization would be a primary source of that person's or that body's opinion. A legislative committee's hearing published as a transcript is a primary source both for that committee's work, and of any of the testimony by witnesses before the committee. A committee's reprint of additional material intended to shed additional light on the matter dealt with in the hearing is secondary source. The same has to apply with maps. A map drawn by a surveyor, say Benjamin Banneker or George Washington, or Mason and Dixon, would be a primary source of that person or pair of persons. A published map based on their surveys, but not compiled by them, would not be a primary source, at all. A map of world war II that was compiled by a noted leader during the war would be a primary source of WWII history. A National Geographic map showing the theater of war during a year of the war would be a secondary source, just as an article in an encyclopedia on WWII would be. The question is not just the period of time that the map relates to, but WHOSE voice does the item provide. If you are not sure, and if the voice is diffused, as a map with named compilers, but not of something they had been involved in as participants, it is secondary, no matter how contemporary it is. Most published maps have to be secondary sources, but there are some instances when they are primary sources. Ken ___________________________ Ken Grabach <[log in to unmask]> Maps Librarian Phone: 513-529-1726 Miami University Libraries Oxford, Ohio 45056 USA