In addition to the formats already mentioned, CLIO is a good source for other primary sources, such as books, film/TV, zines, recorded music, archival materials held at Columbia (including many oral histories--however, a more detailed search is available in the Oral History Portal), maps, and more.
Types of books you might consider using as primary sources:
- Scholarly literature contemporaneous to your period of study written by someone who was a participant or somehow related to the phenomena you're studying. Search in the Catalog and narrow by date (note that subsequent editions of a book will have a different date of publication in the catalog record)
- Poetry, literary fiction, drama, or other creative works contemporaneous to your period of study written by someone who was a participant or somehow related to the phenomena you're studying. Search in the Catalog and narrow the call number to P - Language & Literature or PS -American Literature
- Memoirs and first-person narrative. Include search terms such as (memoir* OR diar*) to search on catalog records containing the words memoir, memoirs, diaries, or diary.
- Published sets of primary source documents. Include the subject term sources to find some of these items.
Searching for primary source texts in CLIO may yield digitized books from HathiTrust as these titles are searchable via the Catalog.
Here are some subject headings related to incarceration and criminal justice (you can add these to your search as a subject):
- Alternatives to imprisonment
- Imprisonment > Literary Collections
- Incarceration
- Political prisoners
- Prison-industrial complex
- Prisoners as authors
- Prisoners’ writings
- Prisons > Literary Collections
- Women prisoners > Literary Collections
