New York Heritage Digital Collections

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:

• thumbnails for 15 documents, none of which are dated 1832 or refer to District 13.
• a sidebar with various categories, including Date of Original. There, that list of dates does includes the date 1832-01-01.

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."

Hendrickson, two problems here:

• That website isn't constructed like Ancestry and FamilySearch, etc., where named collections are easily identified and easily cited.
• “Huntington Town Clerk Archives” isn’t a named collection at the website, it’s an archive whose materials are presented at the site.

When someone clicks your URL, even though the URL includes the words "huntington-town-clerks-archives," that URL does not take them to a collection of that name. It takes them to the home page for New York Heritage. On that home page, we have a number of bold links under a header called "Featured Collections." But we don't find "Huntington Town Clerk Archives" on that page.

So how do we find an entity called "Huntington Town Clerk Archives"?

In the tip-top right corner of the Collections page, we also see four words: Collections   Organizations   Exhibits   About.  If we click on Collections, we are taken to a web page called Collections. with a number of icons for options.  Again, we don't see "Huntington Town Clerk Archives." 

On this Collections page, there is also a navigational bar with   1  2   8  a   b  c  d  e  [etc.].   If we click "h" we are taken to another group of icons for “collections” whose name begins with "h"—six pages of those in alpha order. Scrolling through these pages, we find (on the fifth page of the "h" section) seven collections with various names, each attributed to "Huntington Town Clerk Archives."  So, which of these seven named collections would give us the document needed?

As an alternate approach …

In the top left corner of the “Collections” webpage, we see a Search: Titles and Collection Descriptions. When I type "Huntington Town Clerk Archives," I get two pages of icon options,  seven of which are actually attributed to "Huntington Town Clerk Archives."  One of those is called “Huntington Town Schools.”  The description on the page calls this a collection.  It also has a search box. If I put the desired year in that box, I get 10 more options. Finally, there, I find what we’re looking for: "School District 13 report 1832."

So, how do we get to that without citing a path and waypoint?

Bottom line: “Huntington Town Clerk Archives” isn't an actual "collection." What we have here is this:

• Document: School District 13 report 1832
• Collection: Huntington Town Schools
• Archive: Huntington Town Clerk Archives.

And we’re not at that archive, using that archive. We’re using a conglomerate of materials from many archives, offered at one website.  Any way we approach this, we have to provide a path and waypoints to get down to the document.

As an analogy using plain old books:

• When a book is composed of essays by multiple authors: we cite the chapter author, the chapter title, then the book’s creator and the book.  Anyone can easily find that chapter.
• When it's a simple book by one author and the text, throughout, has subheads: if we want to reference material presented under that subhead, would we pull out the subhead and feature it in our citation as a chapter title? No. We would cite the book, and then the page number. 
• If we were using a digital edition of that simple book with many internal subheads and that digital copy has no visible page numbers, then we’d have to cite a path to get to the section presented under that subhead. This latter is the equivalent of what we’re dealing with when we use this website.