Another Museum Collections Citation of a PDF Inquiry

Chris, pull your copy of EE’s and let’s start at the front. There, on grey pages tucked in at the flyleaf, you’ll find a QuickStart Guide with two pages:

• The Basics: Publications: Print & Online
• The Basics: Manuscripts & Online Images.

Each page has a basic model and shows how to adapt the citation for more-complicated material.

On the manuscripts page, the first thing you’ll see is a basic model for manuscripts. That follows the same format used in the Hagley Museum’s suggested citation. That’s the long-standard format (use by almost all American citation guides) for citing manuscripts.

Mid-page, you’ll see “Layered Citation: Archived Record Digitized Online.” There you have a bit of guidance and a model that corresponds exactly to what you are trying to cite:

When an original manuscript is digitized online, we again have two sources to cite in full—the original document and the website:

Layered Citation: Archived Record Digitized Online

          1. Robert Coalter affidavit, 1 January 1828, Thomas Dunn file, Revolutionary War Bounty Warrants, Executive Department, RG3, Library of Virginia, Richmond; digital images, The Library of Virginia (http://lva1.hosted.exlibris group .com/F?RN=260231634 : accessed 1 April 2015).

In the extract above, I’ve used different colors for the two layers. Note that

• Layer 1 cites the original manuscript. The format is the basic model given at the top of the page for an archived manuscript. It’s not the format given on the prior page for a publication. Here, in layer 1, you can plug the data provided by the Hagley Museum.
• Layer 2 cites the online website (which is a publication) using the standard format for standalone publications, print or online. This follows the same basic format you will have learned on the "Publications" page.

Creator [if needed], Website Title (place of publication = URL : date).

Now go back and look at your draft. You’ll note several points:

• Details for the manuscript should be kept together in one layer; details for the website are kept in another. We don’t mix details from one into the other.
• Your layer 1, the manuscript layer, should not have publication data in parentheses because you're citing a manuscript, not a standalone publication (book, website, etc.)
• In layer 1, the title of the manuscript should not be italicized because the manuscript is not a standalone  publication.   Neither you nor your readers can go to a universal catalog for publications such as the Library of Congress or World.org, type in the name of the manuscript, and find it there.  Catalogs for publications don't cover unpublished manuscripts held in archival collections.

Building on this, you’ll notice that the first two chapters of EE discuss in detail the “ground rules” that apply to all types of sources we use, analyze, and cite.

• Chapter 1 discusses the principles of evidence analysis.
• Chapter 2 discusses the principles of citation. 

These principles are fundamental to everything and should be learned before attempting to pick models from other chapters. The grounding in these two fundamentals chapters is what keeps us from going astray or getting confused when we get to the record-based chapters.

In Chapter 2, “Fundamentals of Citation,” you’ll find this:

EE2.22 “Citing Titles, Basic Rules”

Five basic rules govern our citation of titles, regardless of the type of record or publication we are using:

          BOOK, CD, DVD, JOURNAL, MAP, WEBSITE, ETC.

          For published standalone works, you copy the exact title and put it in italics.

          …

          TITLED, BUT UNPUBLISHED MANUSCRIPT, REGISTER, ETC.

          For an unpublished manuscript or typescript, you should copy the title exactly and put quotation marks around it.

Because you are citing images of an original manuscript—not a typeset and published version of it—you put the title in quotation marks, not italics. 

Following the principles above will give us this:

        1. “DayBook, E. I. du Pont de Nemours and Company, 1800–1813,” pp. 54, 107, Hagley ID: 500_I_Volume_849_Day_Book_1800_1813, E. I. du Pont de Nemours & Company records (Accession 0500.1), Manuscripts and Archives Department, Hagley Museum and Library, Wilmington, Delaware; imaged, The Hagley Museum, Hagley Digital Archives (https://digital.hagley.org/500_I_Volume_849_Day_Book_1800_1813 : accessed 21 October 2020).