Citing an online catalog entry

Oh, the joys of working with data online, as organized by IT engineers whose background usually is radically different from those who research and write history!

In trying to follow your citation, Robyn, I hit a few roadblocks. Briefly:

1. The link worked, but it took me to a general search page.
2. I searched for DDSE(2)/9/5. The search gave me three hits, but not DDSE(2)/9/5. 

3. One of the hits was DDSE(2)/9/8, which your citation mentioned, so I clicked on that and received this page:

However, this does not look anything like what I expected from reading your citation. Your citation begins with words in quotation marks, followed by a date and the word "abstract."

"Assignment of mortgage relating to property in Skelton as described in DDSE(2)/9/5," 4 December 1733, abstract …. [website ID follows]

From that, I expected the first part of your citation to be a titled document created 4 December 1733, a document that represented an abstract of an original document—the type of situation we see when local officials of that era sent abstracts of their documents to an office higher up the chain. But the page that the DDSE(2)/9/8 delivered did not actually have a document.

The actual source we are citing here is the catalog published online by an archive. You're wanting to flag one specific item in that catalog. As a corollary, think of a published book, out of which you'll cite a specific item: a page, a map, a figure, etc.

The DDSE(2)/9/8 or DDSE(2)/9/5 data represents the “specific item” in that catalog. It's a database entry within an online database.  It's not a standalone piece of writing, such as a document in a collection. So let’s move parts of your citation, following the basic pattern:

Layer 1:  “Title of Database,” Website Creator, Website Title (URL : date of access), search term, specific item of interest;

Layer 2:  source-of-the-source data, introduced by the word “citing.”

The result would be this:

“Archives Catalogue," East Riding of Yorkshire Council, East Riding Archives (https://www.eastriding.gov.uk/CalmView/ : accessed 23 December 2017), search term “DDSE(2)/9/8,” item "Assignment of mortgage relating to property in Skelton as described in DDSE(2)/9/5," 4 December 1733; citing Sotheron-Estcourt Family and Estate Records, 1398-1944; DDSE(2)/9/8.

This, of course, presumes that we knew the archival number of the document to start with and could thereby search for that number. I suspect you began by searching for a name. Because you don’t cite a specific person, lets pick one at random from the details that the catalog gives us: William Hesletine. When we query for this name, we get a different results screen:

This creates a different path that has to be included in the citation. The altered portion of the citation would be this:

“Archives Catalogue," East Riding of Yorkshire Council, East Riding Archives (https://www.eastriding.gov.uk/CalmView/ : accessed 23 December 2017), search term “William Hesletine,” link DDSE(2)/9/8, item "Assignment of mortgage relating to property in Skelton as described in DDSE(2)/9/5," 4 December 1733; citing Sotheron-Estcourt Family and Estate Records, 1398-1944; DDSE(2)/9/8.

Re your paragraph that begins “It’s interesting … ,” I got different results when I followed your trail. It may be because the phrase “Assignment of mortgage [etc.]” was already in your cache, considering that you had already located the document.

Great job, Robyn. You catch on quick.