Shropshire Routes to Roots

4. Modern-day sources

Introduction

When doing research about a topic, it is quite rare to come across an entirely new source no one has seen before. Most of the important sources will have been examined, and using them the major topics such as the Industrial Revolution or the coming of the railways have already been studied intensively. In the course of your own research, therefore, you will almost certainly refer to modern sources of historical information.

Books

All local libraries in Shropshire have collections of history books, as does Shropshire Archives. History books are secondary evidence and need to be used carefully. However, most books are reputable, having gone through a system of proof-reading.

Oswestry Library Larger image, in a new window [23kb] [Photograph: Routes to Roots]

In the process of editing and proof reading, the author's peers - colleagues who study and know about the same subject as the author - will have read and made comments on the text; editors will have demanded drafts and re-drafts; teams of proof-readers will have scanned the text for grammatical errors. When the book finally gets on the shelves a lot of checks should have been made to ensure that the facts on which its arguments are based are as accurate as possible.

Although when reading a history book you should never take its truth for granted, provided the book comes from a respectable author and publisher you can be fairly certain that the information in the book is reasonably accurate. To further ensure this, you should check the date the book was published or republished. More recent publications should use the evidence which can be obtained from new techniques, such as carbon dating or x-ray photography of a document.

Of course, although the facts of a book may be accurate, the arguments one author draws from the evidence may be different from those drawn by a different author. You should be aware that there are always other opinions and different points of view. This is the exciting nature of historical debate. For one example of how the same piece of evidence can be interpreted in different ways, see:

• The story of writing: Wroxeter writing: The letter-cutter

The Internet

Online, you will find increasing numbers of archive documents have been digitised and placed on the Web. For example, a major digitisation project for Shropshire was the Secret Shropshire project (opens in a new window), which made available 10,000 images of archive materials and the natural environment from all over the County.

Screenshot of Secret Shropshire website Link to Secret Shropshire website. Opens in a new window.

For secondary evidence as well, the internet is the largest library ever created. The huge amount of material on the internet is both its great strength - and its downfall. Finding anything of use can be difficult, and the internet needs to be used very carefully and selectively. If using the internet for historical research, be sure to read the following:

• Warning and Advice (Opens in a new window).

You can use the internet - as you are probably doing already - for free, in any of Shropshire's archives or libraries, thanks to the People's Network (Opens in a new window). If you are new to using the internet to search for information, explore the learning guides and advice on finding quality information on the web at Ticket to Find (Opens in a new window). Also, look out for the many courses and sessions which are freely available in libraries and other government centres.

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