Primary and secondary sources
Both are in the title, which is unusual
- AS91434 is the only History standard at either level whose title names primary and secondary sources. "Research an historical event or place of significance to New Zealanders, using primary and secondary sources."
- Step four of the process repeats it: selecting sufficient relevant evidence from both primary and secondary sources.
- Excellence repeats it again in AS91435's related descriptor, and 91434's own title carries it. This is not incidental — a folder resting on only one kind has not met the title.
What the standard counts as a source
- The standard's definition is broad: "Sources are places where evidence may be found."
- Its own list, in full: people, books, libraries, museums, newspapers, artefacts, historical site videos, websites, graphs, cartoons, films, recorded radio programmes, DVDs, blogs, archives, memorials, graveyards, collections of letters, diaries, and theses.
- "People" is first on that list, and it is the one students most often overlook because an interview does not feel like research.
- Memorials and graveyards are on the list, which matters if you chose a place.
What the standard counts as primary evidence
- Its list: interviews and transcripts; letters; diaries; government papers; wills; newspaper clippings; photographic files; birth, death and marriage records; statistics; and census data.
- The test is not age. It is proximity. A primary source comes from the time or from a participant.
- Some source types can be either. A newspaper article from 1955 about the 1955 scheme is primary. A newspaper article from 2015 about the 1955 scheme is secondary.
- An interview conducted now with someone who was there is a primary source, even though it was recorded this year — because the evidence originates with a participant.
What secondary sources are for
- They supply context, which is what makes your primary evidence interpretable.
- They tell you what has already been established, so your focusing questions can aim at what has not.
- They disagree with each other, and a disagreement is the best possible target for a research question.
- They are themselves evidence — of how the topic has been understood at different times, which is a Level 3 move.
- What they are not: a substitute for primary evidence. A folder in which every claim rests on a later account has not researched the topic, it has read about it.
Recording source details
- The standard specifies what to record: author, title, publisher, city of publication, date of publication, full URL and accession date(s).
- The purpose is stated: "sufficient source details are recorded to allow the later creation of a reference list/bibliography."
- A full reference list or bibliography is NOT required for this standard. That is stated explicitly.
- So the requirement is lighter than students assume — but it is per-source, and it must be done at the time. A URL recorded a month later may no longer resolve, and accession date is unrecoverable once forgotten.
Worked Example
Worked example
Note: the Riversdale Flats Drainage Scheme is an INVENTED case.
A student has gathered eight sources for their two focusing questions — whose objections were recorded and on what grounds were they set aside, and why was the memorial erected in 1994. Classify them, and identify what the folder is missing.
- 1. A 2011 regional history with a chapter on public works schemes.
- 2. The county council minute book, 1954–1961.
- 3. Newspaper reports from 1954–1956.
- 4. A 1994 booklet produced for the memorial's unveiling.
- 5. A 2003 university thesis on post-war land development.
- 6. Photographs of the flats taken in 1958.
- 7. A website page about the memorial, accessed 2026.
- 8. A 2019 article revisiting the scheme's environmental effects.
Answer:
Step 1 — classify by proximity, not by age.
- Primary: 2 (contemporary official record), 3 (contemporary reporting), 6 (contemporary images), and 4 is primary for the second question — a 1994 booklet is a contemporary record of the 1994 commemoration, even though it is a secondary account of the 1955 events. This double status is worth annotating explicitly.
- Secondary: 1, 5, 8, and 4 again, for the first question.
- 7 depends entirely on what the page is. If it reproduces the memorial's wording it is close to primary; if it summarises the history it is secondary and probably weak. Unclassifiable sources are a sign the source has not been examined properly.
Step 2 — check the balance against the title.
Four primary, four secondary. The title's requirement is met, and comfortably.
Step 3 — check the balance against the QUESTIONS, which is the test students skip.
- Question one — whose objections, and on what grounds — is served by 2, 3, and partly 1 and 5. The primary evidence is official (minutes) and journalistic (newspapers).
- Notice what that means: every primary source for question one was produced by the people who made the decision or by a paper reporting on them. There is no source produced by an objector.
- This is the folder's real gap, and it is invisible from a headline count of four and four.
Step 4 — identify what would fill it, and note that each option is also an Excellence opportunity.
- Submissions or letters from objectors, if they survive — likely in an archive, likely not indexed. A difficult source.
- Descendants of the families named in Source 4, interviewed. A person, which is first on the standard's list, and a source not readily available.
- Records of any organisation the objectors belonged to — a farmers' union, a church, a local body. A source type the existing literature may not have used.
Step 5 — note what to record if the gap cannot be filled.
If no objector source survives, that is a finding, and it must be written down. It belongs in the evaluation as a weakness with a stated effect: my account of the grounds for objection rests entirely on records made by those who overruled them, so it is likely to describe the objections as the council understood them rather than as they were made.
That sentence names a weakness, states the mechanism, and bounds a specific finding — which is the Excellence evaluation descriptor.
Count your sources against each focusing question, not against the folder as a whole. A balanced folder can still have every primary source for one question produced by the same side of the argument.