Digital Archive Records

Robyn,

That’s a great collection you have found. You are correct in matching it to the Georgia Digital Archives example at 3.16. Now for the bad news. Since the publication of the last edition of EE, the Georgia Digital Archives has adopted a new website structure, so that example is obsolete.

So how do we handle a citation to a site such as this? We go back to the basics and ask:

What are we citing?

You are citing an image copy of a letter, at a website, which gives you explicit information about the archival location of the original. Therefore:

• Layer 1 = identification/description of the document
• Layer 2 = citation to the website
• Layer 3 = source of the source information.

The problem in this case is that I could not locate the letter from the information you provided. Well, I possibly could have if I had spent a couple of hours digging through all the possibilities; but we want to create a citation that does not require the user to do that.

Your format tells us that you are citing a named web page ("Nicholas Philip Trist Papers, 1765–1903"), at a website. We should be able to go to that URL and immediately select that web page. Once I select that web page, I should be able to see and select the next item in your citation “letter, Nicholas Trist (London) to Mrs. Trist, 21 December 1775.”  None of that happened.

This is what I did, and what happened:

1. I used the URL, which led me to the website’s home page, which offers a catalog search box for everything the library holds--books, manuscripts, and more.

2. Typing into the search box the first item that you cited “Nicholas Philip Trist Papers, 1765-1903,” I got this page:

So where do we go from here to find that particular letter?  When I clicked on the option “Trist, Nicholas Philip, 1800–1874,” I’m given a new menu page on which the only logical option is “Nicholas Philip Trist Papers, 1765-1903” (the same title I started out with) offering various options—which leads to a new page, with various other options &c.

If this document does not have a dedicated URL, then we dealing with a website citation that requires the identification of a path. Would you relocate the image (it’s likely to still  be in your cache) and then try a citation in which

• Layer 1 describes the document;
• Layer 2 identifies the website using an exact URL and/or a path and waypoints;
• Layer 3 reports the source-of-the-source info—i.e., the citation to the original document that this website provides.

Great job on the first option. The citation is easy to follow. As for the collection number, at the web page to which the URL sends us, the collection number precedes the collection name. EE would cite it there.

Nicho[las] Trist to Mrs Trist, letter, 21 December 1775; image copy, University of North Carolina, UNC: University Libraries (https://finding-aids.lib.unc.edu/02104/#folder_1#1 : accessed 30 January 2022), Collection No. 02104, "Nicholas Philip Trist Papers, 1765-1903," Series 1. Correspondence, 1765-1903, Folder 1; citing Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.