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I’m having difficulty formulating a citation for a document hosted on the New York Heritage Digital Collections website. Various organizations post their archival documents on this platform: https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16373coll130/id/1669/rec/1.
Their suggested format for a CMOS citation is the following:
Digital Collection, Holding Institution. “Title.” New York Heritage Digital Collections. Accessed Month Day, Year. URL
In the case at hand, the organization is the Huntington Town Clerk’s Archives and the collection is Huntington Town Schools. I don’t know whether or not I should treat either the collection or the holding institution as a database. Both are searchable, but the collection doesn’t show in the breadcrumbs at the top of the page. And - the page title seems to be what they named the document, which in this case does not have a title. I used a generic description - not sure if I should have.
Here is my attempt:
School district trustees, Town of Huntington, school district annual report (1832); image, Huntington Town Schools Collection, Huntington Town Clerk's Archives, Empire State Library Network, New York Heritage Digital Collections (https://nyheritage.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p16373coll130/id/1669/rec/1 : viewed 5 July 2025); citing Box 3 Jar 2 B3.
Hello, Hendrickson. You do…
Hello, Hendrickson. You do find some interesting doozies for us to work through!
As with many “suggested citations” at archive websites, the one at this site is totally inadequate. It’s a generic citation for a bibliography or source list—not a reference note citation, which must be specific. The basic problem here is that archives think about “crediting the facility”—not the needs of researchers who must locate and understand the source. Yes, a URL is included in the suggestion, but we all know that those last just about as long as a jar of mayonnaise.
Using your draft citation, I could follow the path through two steps: New York Heritage Digital Collections > Huntington Town Clerk’s Archives. However, I could not find there an option that would take me to the document itself—which the image's frame identifies as "School District 13 report (1832)." When I used the full, specific URL for the document, it did take me to the document; but that approach triggers the problems that you describe in your post above.
At the menu for the first sub-page, Huntington Town Clerk's Archives, we find the following:
Clicking this option, we find our document: School District 13 report 1832.
The simplest way to cite this in a fashion that's retrievable, even if the exact URL is changed in next year's redo of the site by its IT staff, would be a path > waypoint citation such as this:
Empire State Library Network, New York Heritage Digital Collections (https://www.nyheritage.org : accessed 6 July 2025) > Huntington Town Clerk’s Archives > sidebar menu: Date of Original: 1832-01-01 > School District 13 report 1832, an untitled document created by school district trustees, dated 1 January 1832; the website cites Box 3 Jar 2 B3, Huntington town Clerk’s Archives as its source.
As you point out, we have very little information by which we can identify the document. We also have not visited the archives and used the document so that we know how it is archived (exact names of folder < collection < series, etc). For those reasons, the safest way to identify the document is the approach above. However, if you feel strongly about emphasizing the document itself in the first layer, then that approach would generate something like this
Untitled report by “school district trustees,” 1 January 1832; imaged, Empire State Library Network, New York Heritage Digital Collections (https://www.nyheritage.org : accessed 6 July 2025) > Huntington Town Clerk’s Archives > sidebar menu: Date of Original: 1832-01-01 > School District 113 report 1832; the website cites Box 3 Jar 2 B3, Huntington town Clerk’s Archives as its source.
You’ll also note that the last layer of both versions (the “citing …” layer) is a bit wordier than EE’s typical examples. Given the nature of what is cited prior to that layer, some users of your citation might wonder exactly who or what was “citing Box Jar 2 B3, etc.”—i.e., whether that’s cited by the website or cited within the document. As always, our analysis of this situation and its needs should trump any concept of "formulaic bridge words."