Compilation of Extracts from Books & Journals

Hello, Nancy.

When a source comes from a university archive--directly or through a library--it's incredible that the recipient is not given an adequate citation of the document, file, and collection. 

Before we jump in blindly, we must clarify one point: You show a document title in quotation marks. Does that exact title appear at the top of the loose paper, or is that your own description of the contents that you've had to had for want of a title?

Also, do you have the identity of the university archive staffer who transmitted the document and, theoretically, should be able to identify for you the file and collection in which the original of this paper appears?

Thanks for the clarification. If you hear directly from the archivist, you should be able to simplify your citation. In the meanwhile, the one significant item missing from your proposed citation is the provenance or custodial history of the item that speaks to its authenticity. It's understandable that you would feel the letter of transmittal from the library to you really isn't important to the substance of the document; but until and unless you can cite it more directly to the university archives, that intermediary needs to stay in your identification of provenance. The result would be something of this sort:

"Collected Data on Thomas Armstrong, Class of 1830," undated loose paper extracting Armstrong references from various Miami University publications and journals, provided  [date] by [name of archivist], Miami University Archives (Oxford, Ohio), to [name of your contact at library], [name of Library], [City, State—in parentheses as with Oxford, Ohio]; forwarded [date] by _______ to Nancy ______ (your City, State); citing Miami University Historical Faculty Files, Miami University Archives, Oxford.

Katydid, have you seen 5.17, 5.22, 7.31, or 8.37? All of these deal with unpublished typescripts at libraries, including two examples for cemetery transcriptions.

Disagreement between the spine of a shelved book and the title on the inside title page is a frequent situation, particularly with a binder to which libraries add a variety of data. With a published book, the convention (covered at EE 12.1) is to cite only what is on the title page, because that is how the book will be identified in every library catalog. However, with individual items in a one-off binder—one that exists only in that library, will likely be cataloged under the binder title, and will likely have other items added to it—we would treat that like a chapter in a book and cite both titles. A First Reference Note citation would be this:

Ralph and Helen Evans, "Graveyards in Love County," in binder "Love County Cemeteries" (typescript, n.d., Ardmore Public Library),  27, Dibrell Cemetery entry for Rosyanne E. Driggers.

You´ll notice a couple of other differences between this and your draft.

• When we are citing an item with an author or compiler, the reference note (like the source list entry) begins with the name of the author-compiler. It does not begin with the identification of what is on a particular page within that compilation.
• When we cite a library or archive, we cite it by name, city, and state. A standard citation, using any style guide, does not include the street address or the zip code. If, in our working files, we want to add that in a second layer for our own use, we can, of course.