Finding and organising sources
What the standard means by organisation
- Two things are named: selecting relevant evidence from a variety of sources, and recording source details so the evidence can be verified.
- "Variety" is assessable. Twelve newspaper articles are twelve sources and one kind of source.
- "Verified" sets the standard for your referencing. Someone else must be able to find the exact thing you used. That is a higher bar than a bibliography.
- Selection is part of the stage. You are not asked to gather everything; you are asked to select what is relevant to your focusing questions, which means some things you find should be left out — and saying why is annotation.
Where to look, in the order that works
- Your library's catalogue and databases, for published local and national histories.
- Papers Past, for New Zealand newspapers — the single richest source for most local topics, and searchable by date and place.
- Your local museum, archive or historical society. They hold the material nobody has digitised, and staff know what exists. Email or visit early; things take time to retrieve.
- Council records — minutes, plans, correspondence. Often held by the council or the regional archive, and often unused by students.
- Official collections — Archives New Zealand, the National Library, Te Ara, NZHistory, iwi and community organisations.
- People. For anything within living memory, an interview is a source you create, and it reaches what no archive holds. Ask your teacher about consent and recording before you arrange one.
Building genuine variety
- Aim for at least four different kinds, and check them off:
- Contemporary written — newspapers, letters, minutes, reports of the time.
- Contemporary visual or physical — photographs, maps, plans, the place itself, an inscription, an object.
- Later scholarly — a historian's book or article.
- Later personal — a recollection, an interview, an oral history.
- Different kinds fail in different ways, which is exactly why variety matters: a newspaper's blind spots are not a minute book's.
- The place itself is a source if your topic is a place. Photograph it, measure it, transcribe the inscription, note what is not there. Students consistently forget the object they are studying is evidence.
- A visual source needs annotating like any other — who made it, when, why, and what it was made to show.
Recording source details so evidence can be verified
- Record at the moment you use it, not later. Reconstruction is the most avoidable time loss in this standard.
- For every source, record: author or creator; title; date created; publisher, newspaper or archive; where you found it (URL, shelf mark, reference number, page); and the date you accessed it.
- For an interview: the person's name, the date, where it took place, and that they consented.
- For a photograph or object: the holder, the reference number, and any caption or inscription, transcribed exactly.
- Number your sources. Your annotations and cross-references will point at them constantly, and Source 7 is faster than a title every time.
Selecting, which is where students over-collect
- More sources is not better past about twelve. Beyond that, the annotation stage — which is where the marks are — gets thinner per source.
- Select against your focusing questions. For each source ask: which question does this help with, and what does it add that I do not already have?
- Keep a short "found but not used" list with one line each. Rejected: [source], because it repeats Source 3 with no new detail. That single line demonstrates selection, which is a named part of the stage, and it costs nothing.
- Do not discard a source because it disagrees with the others. Disagreement is the most valuable thing you can find. Discarding it is the worst mistake available at this stage.
Worked Example
Worked example
A student inquiring into the Mangaroa Bridge memorial (invented, written for this page) has found these eight sources.
- 1. A local history book, published 1998, one chapter on the accident.
- 2. A district newspaper report of the accident, 1931.
- 3. A district newspaper report of the unveiling, 1940.
- 4. A newspaper letter about the memorial fund, 1935.
- 5. A newspaper editorial about the fund, 1937.
- 6. Council minutes recording the site decision, 1938.
- 7. A photograph of the unveiling, 1940, held by the local museum.
- 8. The memorial itself, with its inscription.
Assess the variety and the gaps.
Answer:
Step 1 — count the kinds, not the sources.
- Contemporary written: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Five sources — but four of them are the same newspaper.
- Contemporary visual or physical: 7 and 8. Good, and 8 is the strongest source here because it is the object of the inquiry.
- Later scholarly: 1. One.
- Later personal: none.
Step 2 — name the problem precisely. Eight sources, but four of the five contemporary written ones passed through one newspaper's editor. They corroborate each other far less than their number suggests — the same selection decisions shaped all four.
Step 3 — identify what source 6 is doing, because it is the most valuable one. The council minutes are the only contemporary written source not produced by the newspaper. That makes them the natural cross-check on everything sources 2–5 claim, and they should be used that way rather than as one more item.
Step 4 — fill the gaps in priority order.
- Later personal is the largest gap. 1940 is within reach of people whose parents were there. An oral history interview, or a written recollection held by the museum, would add the only category currently empty.
- A second later scholarly source would let the 1998 chapter be checked rather than trusted.
- Fund records or a subscription list, if the museum or council holds them, would answer the nine-year question directly — and would be a different kind of contemporary written source from a newspaper.
Step 5 — record the details. For source 6: the council, the meeting date, the minute book's reference number and the archive holding it. For source 7: the museum, the accession number, and the caption transcribed exactly. Number them all, because the annotations will point at them constantly.
Eight sources, four types, and one gap. The newspaper block is one voice not four; the council minutes are the most valuable cross-check; the memorial itself is a source; and the empty category — later personal — is the one worth a week's effort.