Quaker yearly meeting minute compilations

By sdarnowsky on Thu, 09/12/2024 - 17:15

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I would welcome suggestions for citing material from https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89102885654&view=1up&seq=1&skin=2021. It appears to be a bound compilation of the minutes of Indiana Yearly Meeting from 1864 to 1870. There does not appear to be any title page for the compilation itself. Page 7 of the file includes what looks like a title page, but it's really only a reference to an 1850 act by the Indiana state legislature and has nothing to do with the yearly meeting minutes per se. The minutes from 1864 begin on page 23 of the file and are numbered sequentially, beginning with the number 1. The minutes from 1865 begin on page 93 of the file and again are numbered sequentially, beginning with the number 1. And so forth through 1870.

I'm not sure how to cite the whole work, let alone how to cite a particular passage within it. Help!

Submitted byEEon Fri, 09/13/2024 - 09:17

sdarnowsky,

You've found a great example to make the point that even "plain 'ol books" can create a complicated citation.

In this case, you will need a three-layer citation:

  • Layer 1: citing the original publication  (Template 1);
  • Layer 2: citing the website that provides the image (Template 10);
  • Layer 3: explaining the quirky situation.

Your principal problem is the lack of an actual title page for the publication. In situations such as this, when we have no title page for a book imaged online, we can find cataloging data to guide us in one of several places, starting with these:

  1. The website that has published the image.
  2. A general catalog such as Library of Congress (loc.gov) or Worldcat.org.
  3. The catalog of the library that supplied the image the website is offering (in this case, the University of Wisconsin Library)

All of these identify the publication as a serial published annually (as a rule) by a religious society. They also provide cataloging data.  EE4 covers the citation of this type of publication at 13.85 Series “Occasion Publications” by Societies.

Submitted bysdarnowskyon Fri, 09/13/2024 - 14:00

Thanks so much! Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find the book in loc.gov or worldcat.org, and noted that both Hathitrust and the University of Wisconsin have some inaccurate information about the book. (They cite it as being Hicksite minutes, but I know from the names of the people mentioned in it that it is actually Orthodox minutes.) That said, their suggested citations and your guidance gave me ideas for how to handle the citation, perhaps something like this:

Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends (Orthodox), Minutes of Indiana Yearly Meeting of Friends 1864-1870 (Richmond, Indiana: circa 1870), 122-124; imaged, HathiTrust (https://hathitrust.org : accessed 13 September 2024), citing Wisconsin Historical Society, University of Wisconsin; the specified page numbers are the page numbers of the imaged file rather than the page numbers from the 1865 yearly meeting minutes themselves.

I don't think there's a series/volume number per se, but including the year range for the yearly meeting minutes in the title (as Hathitrust did) should help.

Submitted byEEon Sat, 09/14/2024 - 09:18

You're right, loc.gov doesn't deliver any similar titles, when searching under "books" or "periodicals," a curious situation. Worldcat.org delivers six different catalog entries for this series, because umpteen libraries submitted their cataloging entries in six different ways. There's a lesson for us here, too:  Not even librarians agree on citations to quirky materials, even for what should be "basic books." As with everything about research, we have to seek out all possibilities for details and perspectives, analyze and correlate, then make our decisions.