Swedish Record or How to Cite a Record Viewer

I am struggling with how to cite digital images of Swedish church records. Both of the companies that provide access to them online, ArkivDigital and Genline, require downloading a viewer to access images. How should I note this in the citation, or should I at all. Should I just state that it is a digital image and put the website for the program?

On a seperate note, Genline has digitized the FHL microfilms while ArkivDigital is digitizing the original books. Should this be noted any where or assume that by going to company's website, this can be discovered?

Submitted byEEon Mon, 09/24/2012 - 17:56

jshawgen:

Question 1: The basic citation would follow the patterns shown by EE's QuickCheck Model on p. 314 (church records, digitized online) and the specific Swedish example at EE 7.45. If you want to add a note to indicate that the provider requires users to download a specific viewer, you're certainly free to do so. (As a comparative example, when citing EE's digital edition, would you feel it necessary to cite the fact that a specific viewer must be downloaded--or would you just cite EE's digital edition as per its title page?)

Question 2: Definitely, when citing Genline, EE would note that the digital version came from the microfilm, as opposed to ArkivDigital making its images from the original volumes. Odds are great that the two will have significant differences in legibility from one page to the next.