How to do research

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Starting your research

If you are researching your own community or family history, embarking on your own academic research journey or if you would like to continue researching an individual, event or organization that you have encountered on South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories, you may want to consider visiting an archive. Archives can take many forms and vary in scale. Some have a narrow focus on a particular theme or place, such as Heritage Quay at the University of Huddersfield, a regional archive which holds important materials on West Yorkshire’s South Asian communities, whilst others are more expansive, with collections from around the world. For example, the India Office Records Collection at the British Library contains nine miles of archives. Your research questions will determine where to look for relevant materials, and you may find the following list of local and national archives useful.

Finding materials

Finding archival materials has been made easier because of online catalogue searching and increasing access to digitized sources. However, not all archives have online catalogues and not all sources are digitized. Sometimes you will rely on handlists or card catalogues, as well as expert knowledge from archivists and helpdesks.

There are several ways to find the materials you are looking for:

When reading relevant history books, check the citations to learn more about the collections which informed the author’s research.
The National Archives Discovery is a search catalogue that connects 2,500 archives across the UK. This single point of access is a useful place to start locating sources relevant to your research. Here is more information on how to search Discovery using keywords.
If you know which archive holds materials relevant to your research, visit their website and search their catalogues before booking a visit. The archive may have produced research guides, which collate archival materials in their collections around a theme. Smaller archives may not have an online search function, and all their collections may not be catalogued. If this is the case, try emailing the archive for further information.
Some materials are not deposited in an archive and instead may be held privately by a family or institution. If you think a private collection will be useful for your research, try contacting the owner for more information.

On each entry of South Asian Britain: Connecting Histories, you will see a list of archival materials that have informed our research and where these materials are held. This is a useful starting point for further research on an individual, event or organization listed in the resource.

Inside the archives

Regulations at archives can vary greatly. Some require advanced ordering of materials, whilst others may allow you to order on the day. In addition, you may need to make an appointment to visit certain archives, and their opening hours may vary day to day. Check the individual archive website to learn more about their procedures. If in doubt, email the archive to ask about using their facilities.

Archives usually do not allow the use of pens, so make sure you bring a pencil or a laptop to record notes. In addition, policies around photographing materials vary across archives and even across collections.

Interpreting primary sources

Archival research can take a long time to complete. Useful records are, at times, scattered across archives, and you may not always find exactly what you are looking for, but you may make exciting, unexpected discoveries too. In exploring archival records, you may come across sources which illuminate histories that you had not encountered before or ideas which refine your understanding of the past. The ability to critically analyse and interpret sources is crucial in being able to recognize the relative strengths or limitations of a source for your research. Here are some questions to think about when analysing a record:

Purpose:

Who produced this record, and what is their background?
When was it produced?
Why has this record been produced?
Why has it been preserved?

Audience:

Who was this record produced for and why?
Did the author intend the record to be publicly accessible?

Context:

What type of source is it?
Within which social, political, economic or cultural context was this record produced?

Some entries on the resource are accompanied by digitized archival materials, which are publicly accessible for researchers to analyse and cite in their own projects.

About the site | About the project | How to use this site | About the team |

About oral histories | How to do research | Archival links | Copyright |