Gary Gauthier raises a question every researcher faces again and again. We paraphrase here for brevity: "What do we do when we have already constructed a correctly formatted citation and the site provider disappears—i.e., sells, merges, or goes out of business? ..."

Mary is perplexed. As a family researcher, she has found a derivative source (a newspaper account) that mentions an original court record. But diligent efforts to find the original have been fruitless. How does she report this? she asks, in another forum. As usual, she received a variety of opinions. As usual, there were substantial contradictions between them and some confusion over concepts. Let’s try to iron out a few of them.

We hear it everywhere: “I’ve hit this brick wall!” ... Or worse, “I’ve hit this brick wall. This problem just can’t be solved!” ... Or even worse, “I’ve hit this brick wall. There’s nothing more to be found. So I’ll just make a decision on the basis of what I already have.” Ah, yes. Frustration, hopelessness, and folly.

An earlier posting about the research process has triggered a boatload of questions—and a bit of frustration. “I must not be doing something right,” sighed one friend of this page. ...

Inquiring minds have asked: "How does EE differ from CMOS?"

Yesterday’s QuickTest presented a page from a published source, with a helpful abstract of a document. We used the abstract to locate the original, then presented you with a typescript of the full document—inviting you to compare the two and tell us whether-and-why the effort was or was not worth it. ...

After reading the latest Q & A from Chicago Manual,1 our friend Bonnie posed her own question that gets to the heart of Evidence Style and why it follows certain practices ...

Our questioner had just stumbled upon the Industrial Schedule of the 1860 U.S. census. An oddball? Well, as you can see from the image here, it certainly doesn’t look like the census we typically consult when we set out to identify Americans of the past ...

An email forum for researchers currently carries a thread on citing long URLs vs. digital paths (aka “waypoints”). One commenter saw an advantage: If we cite the path, then we can eliminate layered citations. Can we really?