Starting your research

When you are doing research in libraries or archives, it is important to do some preparation ahead of time.

Research question

Figure out what your research question is. What topics are you interested in? Who are the people or organizations involved? What is the date range? What question(s) are you trying to answer?

Finding the answer to your question may be as simple as getting files relating to an aircraft accident, ordering books relating to Expo 67, or records relating to a specific residential school. Or it might require more research.

LAC holds the national library collection, the Government of Canada’s archival materials, as well as collections from private donors in many fields across Canada. To get a better idea of the collections LAC holds, explore different themes in the collection.

Refine your research question as you progress. Even if you don’t have it figured out right away, you can still move on to the next step!

Background research

Background research gives you context for what you’re searching for and helps identify keywords to search with. This can include some or all of the following:

Reading about the historical context of your research question in published materials, such as books, articles or reliable web pages.
Exploring LAC’s electronic research support tools. LAC has many useful tools and guides to help you navigate the institution’s library and archival collections. These tools and guides touch on subjects like birth, marriage and death records, newspapers, Black Canadians, Indigenous and military history.
Reading our Discover Blog, which has practical information on how to search our archival and published collections. You’ll find posts about film, video and sound collections, literature, how to search for photos, digitized publications, and more.

Think of keywords in archival or library research the same way that you think about keywords in a Google search.

Developing keywords

Once you have conducted your background research, think about which keywords will help you find what you are looking for. For example, if you are looking for information about war brides in general, these are some keywords that you can use:

war brides
Canadian Wives’ Bureau
fiancées of citizens
alien fiancées
overseas wives
soldiers’ wives

Here are some things to keep in mind:

Spellings of names and places are not always consistent. For example, the last name McDonald can be spelled in different ways: McDonald, MacDonald, Macdonald, M’Donald, Mc Donald, Donald Mc. You can use wildcards to automatically find variations. For example, searching for M?c?Donald will match McDonald, MacDonald, Mac Donald etc.
The way that people use language changes over time. The meaning of words can shift over time, and people in the past may have used different words to describe things than we do today. This includes place names. For example, what we know today as Gatineau used to be called Hull.
The language that you use to search matters. Much of our published collection and most of our archival collection is only available in one language, so they are generally only available and searchable in the original language. If you are searching for something in New France, using a term like “fur trader” will likely not yield the results that you are looking for.

The next step is to use your keywords to search. You have several options, including:

Aurora catalogue of published material. To get the best results, see our Aurora help pages.
Collection Search, our main archival search engine. To get the best results see Using Collection Search
One of our stand-alone databases using Search the Collections. Search the list of tools and guides to find a database on the topic you are looking for

See our guides on How to do archival research or How to do library research to learn more.

Ask us a question

If you need any help with your research, use the Ask us a question form. LAC can point you towards helpful resources and answer questions before you visit.

If your question is more complicated, you can set up a reference appointment with one of LAC’s reference archivists. These appointments can be by phone, by videoconference or in person and are available from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. and 1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. ET, inclusively, Monday through Friday.

Reference archivists can’t do all your research for you, but they have the expertise to point you in the right direction. They can clarify the ATIP request process (access to information and privacy requests) or help refine your keywords, or they might have some other useful suggestions.