>> From the Library of Congress in Washington DC. >> In my opinion, primary sources are essential for inquiry for several reasons. One of the first reasons is that primary sources are not interpreted by somebody else and a basic underpinning of inquiry is that anyone doing inquiry will be working toward developing his or her own understandings. If you start an inquiry process with the secondary source, you're reading what somebody else has already decided it means in a vary summarized way without the deep perspectives. So, primary sources open up the door to the possibility of forming your own interpretation. Now, you're going to inform your own interpretation with both primary and secondary sources. You can't some up with all historical perspective on your own. But, starting an inquiry process with the primary source, opens the door to deep questioning that you can do. The second thing that I think is so valuable about primary sources and inquiry is in historical inquiry. History is really the study of humans, of people. If you read a secondary source, you don't really see the people behind the writing. If however, you're confronted with a primary source, you can see that it was created by a person. There are people in it. There are people who created it. It's in a human context. And I think that you are more likely, students, are more likely to get to the human side of history when they use primary sources with images and documents and diaries and letters and the actual documents that were created by real people in history, not for the purpose of teaching history, but because they are living history. A third thing that I think is really important about using primary sources is that they are authentic. And we want learning to be authentic. We want students to be able to connect their learning to the real world. Well, text books are not really authentic. They are written for school and students often don't see any connection between what they are learning and real life. "Why am I learning this?" they ask us. But, when you use primary sources, these are authentic things that were created in real life and I think that students are much more likely to make the connection, not only to the authenticity of the time period they're studying but also to the authenticity to the real world living today. And they tend to connect learning to their own experiences, both now and in the future. >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov.