Citing online high school yearbook

By Anonymous on Sun, 11/16/2014 - 14:40

Forums

I've been searching Evidence Explained, Second Edition, for a proper way to cite an online high school yearbook, but I'm not finding a direct reference in the index for yearbooks (online or printed).  I'm under the impression that perhaps yearbooks would be handled under another section in EE, but I'm unsure of what section to base my citation on.  Can you provide guidance?

Submitted byEEon Sun, 11/16/2014 - 15:33

dpslager,

Let me answer with a question: Why would citing a yearbook be different from citing any other type of book? Why would citing, say, a highschool yearbook be different from citing, say, an 1948 yearbook of the Missouri Historical Society? 

A basic book citation calls for citing,

Author-Creator, Title:Subtitle (place of publication: publisher, date), page.

To get this data, we study a book's front matter. Sometimes a book's front matter gives us all the needed data. Sometimes a book's front matter is missing one or more pieces of that information—in which case, the basic rules for missing information apply (see EE 12.14 and 12.15).

If we view online images of a book, then we have a second layer to cite: the digital provider. We follow the same basic pattern because a website is the online equivalent of a book. At Google Books, where we access a book simply by Googling for its name, the website citation is simply a matter of citing Website Title (place/URL : date).  At a provider such as Ancestry, where books are delivered through a specifically titled database, we would also need to cite the name of the database (as with a chapter in a book), then add Website Title (place/URL : date).  

Logical?

Submitted bydpslageron Sun, 11/16/2014 - 18:28

Yes, that makes complete sense to cite it as a published book.  OK, so I've tried my hand at crafting a citation based on the front matter of the yearbook as well as the online provider's website where it was located.

Mercy High School, The Mercian (n.p., 1929), p. 52; "U.S. School Yearbooks, 1880-2012," Ancestry.com (http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 16 November 2014).

In the place of the Author-Creator I put the name of the high school, and for the Title:Subtitle I put the name of the yearbook. I could not locate any publishing information anywhere in the front-matter, and the copyright year was 1929, so the next part of the citation was (n.p., 1929).  My grandmother's senior photo was located on p. 52.  I found this all in the Ancestry.com database noted.  I've uploaded an image of the only front matter of the book that was of any use to this citation.  Would this citation meet EE standards and I've written it?

Submitted byEEon Mon, 11/17/2014 - 11:18

dpslager, you've done a great job of thinking through the issues. I see only two left:

  1. Place. As you note, the volume has no publication place. Given the time frame, it might have been published in the same town as Mercy High School or the school might have used a company from elsewhere. The standard practice is to use N.p. or n.p. as you've done, to indicate "No place of publication given."  However, that still would leave one wondering where Mercy High School is.  Using the name of the school as an institutional author is appropriate--as we do with churches, etc.  In that case, we can use the same practice EE follows for these cases: Name the institution but add it's city state in parentheses.  In other words, the author would be, say "Mercy High School (Chicago, Illinois)."
  2. Date. The image you show carries the date "1930," although the copyright date you found is 1929. If you use the date of copyright (which might have been secured before actual publication), and you are attaching it to a discussion of someone who was a "senior" in that yearbook, would your reader (or you, ten years from now after your memory has gone cold), assume that the person was in the "Class of 1929" rather than the "Class of 1930"?