Database Guide - Gale Primary Sources

Gale Primary Sources are a collection of digitized primary source material useful for historians, literary and media scholars. They include:

• 17th and 18th Century Burney Collection
• 19th Century UK Periodicals
• British Library Newspapers
• The Times Digital Archive

The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Collection
A collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century English news media compiled by Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817) in 700 bound volumes. It includes pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers, ranging from early parliamentary debates and proclamations, to coffee house newsbooks. Useful for historians of politics, education and economics as well as the printed press.

Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals
Nineteenth Century UK Periodicals is a collection of titles covering the events, lives, values, and themes that shaped the nineteenth century world. It provides an invaluable, fully-searchable resource for the study of British life in the nineteenth century. It includes commercial lifestyle publishing in Britain with a particular focus on women, children, humour, and leisure activity in the Victorian age. A separate guide is available for this database.

British Library Newspapers
A wide range of local and regional newspapers which reflect the social, political, and cultural events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, including titles such as the Illustrated Police News to radical papers like the Chartist Northern Star. These newspapers provide important information about life in towns and major cities, providing researchers with a unique, first-hand perspective on history, for example, you can find specialist titles such as the Poor Law Unions’ Gazette. With more than 160 newspaper titles, the series is comprised of approximately 5.5 million pages of historic content, from articles to advertisements. This collection illuminates diverse and distinct regional attitudes, cultures, and vernaculars, providing an alternative viewpoint to the London-centric national press over a period of more than 200 years.

The Times Digital Archive
The Times of London is widely considered to be the world’s ‘newspaper of record’ and its archive is an invaluable resource to historians. The Times Digital Archive includes every page, editorial, news item, announcement, obituary and advertisement from The Times newspaper from 1785-2014. A separate guide is available for this database.

• Go to LibrarySearch 
  
  
• Log in using your CCCU username and password. If you are away from campus, or connecting with your own device over Wi-Fi, you will need to include @canterbury.ac.uk after your CCCU username.
  
  
• Select Find Databases A-Z, then click on G for Gale Primary Sources, finally click on the link to the database to open it in a new tab.

1. You can use the single cross-search interface to interrogate all five collections, or search each one individually.
   
   
2. You can apply date limits to search a particular period or date range.
   
   
3. You should use natural language searching as Gale does not apply a stop word list and searches the small connecting words e.g. hunt red october will not retrieve the same results as the hunt for red october. Using quotation marks will ensure the search engine finds documents with all the terms in the exact order specified e.g. “the hunt for red october”

1. Try and find a newspaper article about the actor William Powell who appeared in the late 18th century tragedy Cyrus.
   
   
2. Remember newspapers tend to write quite formally and so you may need to look for “Mr Powell”.
   
   
3. Choose the most suitable database/s for a newspaper contemporary with this period.
   
   
4. Use the date limit 1750-1800 to improve the accuracy of your search.
   
   
5. Make sure that you filter your result by content type ‘newspapers and periodicals’ to remove other source types.
   
   
6. Some of the articles are about a ship called the Cyrus. How could you improve your search further?
   
   
7. Use the Topic finder to see a visualization of the search.

You can the read the accessibility statements of Gale to find out how you can make your search experience accessible.

Your Learning and Research Librarian will be able to help you make the best use of online resources. For detailed guidance, book a tutorial via the Learning Skills Hub.