26 April 2014

A Citation Question-Separate Publications Bound Together

Digital images are great, but sometimes they create slight confusion when crafting a citation from them.

I located a reference in a Depression era state university report to my grandmother's sister. Apparently putting her name on the list of students of junior standing was done prematurely. My aunt wasn't the only one in this situation and it's not clear if she didn't make sufficient progress that semester due to academic problems, financial problems or something else. It's very possible that money temporarily ran out, although she did eventually graduate.

I'm trying to craft a reasonable citation before I put the image on the blog. While I don't cite in proper format here, I do need to include all essential details of where the document was located. I located it on Mocavo.com and Mocavo.com's "publication" of this report appears to have been a digital copy of a bound volume of reports from several years housed in a university library. 

I might not have realized this if I had simply copied the image with Aunt Margaret's name and stopped. The fact that her reference was on page 8 and the image number from the Mocavo.com publication was over 800 should have been a clue that I was looking at either a serial publication or a bound copy of several individual items. People wonder why scanning covers of books is necessary. Materials like this make it clear.

It was clear to me that the cover was not the original, but rather was the result of items that had been sent by the university to the bindery to be bound for better preservation. 

But this brings me back to the original question: "What do I need in this citation?"

While I haven't crafted the citation yet, I think it needs to include more than just the reference to the publication name that Mocavo.com has given to this bound item. Websites come and go. My citation needs to include:
  • the website-Mocavo.com, date of access, and the publication name Mocavo.com assigned to this publication.
  • reference to the university library that houses the original from which the digital image was made.
  • complete name and date of original publication.
  • Title, author, etc.
  • Specific report which mentions the individual in question--that's necessary as it gets to which state school she attended and helps others find this publication if the original bound one cannot be found.
Some may say that the university library portion of this reference is not necessary if the complete date and place of original publication is provided. Perhaps. But it makes it easier for someone else (or me) to later locate the original if necessary. 

Stay tuned. Aunt Margaret's "change" in classification has created a few issues for me. It probably created a few issues for her as well, but I don't have any first hand knowledge of those.

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