Personally Special LOC Citation

What a find you made, Paul! That is priceless.

As for the citation, let's start with this point:  There is no website called Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright Papers, 1809–1979. The website to which you have referred us is Library of Congress. That's why the URL begins with www.loc.gov.

As LC's cataloging data tells us, "Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright Papers, 1809–1979" is the name of a manuscript collection physically at LC, for which LC's website offers a digitized copy. This is the same situation as if you were using a manuscript courthouse volume digitized at FamilySearch.

You have two things to cite:

• Layer 1: The original manuscript.
• Layer 2: The website that is offering digitized copy.

Would you like to try it from this perspective, using the cataloging data provided by LC to create Layer 1, then citing the website as you would FamilySearch or Ancestry or HathiTrust?

Paul, the example on p. 554 of the 1st edition of EE is for a database created by the Library of Congress that contains many different things, by and about many different individuals. LC created its own database to offer images of various things and LC gave it a catchy “umbrella” title. It's not the imaging of a specific ledger from a specific collection.

Against that backdrop, re-read your last citation with two questions in mind:

1. Whose name is in the “Author/Creator field?  Library of Congress. Did LC create that register you’re using? No. The Wright brothers created that material.
2. What is the name you are using for the database? “Business Journals and Ledgers, 1901–1902.”  Did LC create a database that it is calling “Business Journals and Ledgers, 1901–1902,”wherein it offers business journals and ledgers from across the nation, created in that year—images it pulls from a variety of collections in its possession?  No.  According to LC’s cataloging data, “Business Journals and Ledgers, 1901–1902” is just one file within the collection “Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright Papers, 1809–1979.”

You really do have a situation in which you have two different entities to cite, each in its own layer, with no mixing into one layer data that describes the other entity.

LAYER 1: The Register

For a reference note to a manuscript register, the essentials are these:

Author, “Title of Register” or description of untitled manuscript, page number, entry with date.

That’s it. Whether you are citing a business journal or ledger (aka “day book”), a courthouse register, a diary, etc., it’s all the same.  That’s the detail that describes what you are using. For your specific case, it would be this:

Wilbur and Orville Wright, Untitled Ledger for 1901–1902, p. 284, undated entry for J. H. Harris.

If you were using this register onsite, then your second layer would be the identification of the collection, record group, repository, and city/state/country. In this case you are using it online. Therefore, your second layer is the website that offers images.

LAYER 2: The Website

The basic pattern for a website is the same you would use for a book, a CD, an individually published map, or any other item published as a standalone.

If you are citing a specific database at the website, that equates to citing a specific chapter within a book (or an article within a journal), which you would identify first, in quotation marks. The basic pattern is this:

 “Title of Database or Chapter, If Any,” Creator of Website, Title of Website (Place of publication = URL : date), specific item, with however much detail needed.

If a site is eponymous—if its exact title is the name of the creator—then we do not have to repeat the name of that entity in both fields. In your case, you would end up with this:

“Wilbur Wright & Orville Wright Papers, 1809–1979,” Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/resource/mwright.04001/?sp=287  : accessed 21 December 2020), image 287 of file “Business Journals and Ledgers, 1901–1902”

LAYER 3:

In this layer, we report what the website tells us about where the item it has imaged can be found. This layer tells us what our source is citing. It’s not where we cite a page number or an image number that we see with our own eyes.

In the case at hand, the only additional source-of-the-source data that the cataloging gives us is this:

Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

COMPLETE CITATION:

Putting it all together, you’d have this (with different colors for each layer):

Reference Note:

          1. Wilbur and Orville Wright, Untitled Ledger for 1901 & 1902, p. 284, undated entry for J. H. Harris;  “Wilbur Wright & Orville Wright Papers, 1809–1979,” Library of Congress (https://www.loc.gov/resource/mwright.04001/?sp=287  : accessed 20 December 2020), image 287 of file “Business Journals and Ledgers; Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

Short Citation:

          11. Wright and Wright, Untitled Ledger for 1901 & 1902, p. 284.

For the Source List Entry, we might choose to feature (a) the original register at the repository that put it on line; or (b) the website. The two approaches would give us this.

Source List Entry:

Wright, Wilbur & Orville. Business Journals and Ledgers, 1901–1902. Wilbur Wright and Orville Wright Papers 1809–1979. Manuscript Division. Library of Congress. Washington, D.C. Imaged at Library of Congress. https://www.loc.gov/resource/mwright.04001.

(or, to feature the website)

“Wilbur Wright & Orville Wright Papers, 1809–1979.” Library of Congress.  https://www.loc.gov/resource/mwright.04001.

MISCELLANY:

I’m guessing (which, yes, I really should not do), that when you approached the issue of citation, you thought: Hmhh, this is at the Library of Congress website, so let’s see if EE has an example of something that’s at the Library of Congress website.

What’s most important is not the identity of the repository or the website. Most repositories hold a variety of things.  A repository is just a place where a certain thing is found. Our citation will vary according to the kind of thing we’re using.Similarly, a website may have just one thing or a variety of things. The nature of the item we are using always determines the structure of our citation. The nature of the item is what speaks to the type of evidence we're offering and the validity of that evidence.

Regarding whether or not to use the Digital ID: 

1. In the QuickCheck Model on p. 554 of EE’s first edition, look at the URL, then compare it to the digital ID. You see that the whole citation is to a database containing many different things about many different people; and the URL is for the generic landing page, where we query for specific items. That URL is completely different from the digital ID.  So we add the digital ID for the specific document.
2. In the case at hand, the URL you give is to the specific page of the specific item. It contains the same data we find in the digital ID: mwright.04001. The digital ID adds the specific image number, but we’ve already cited the image number and do not have to repeat it. In a Source List Entry, we would never cite the page number anyway.

Thanks for the kind words, Paul—and a Merry Christmas to you, as well.