Citing a scan of a photocopy of an original document

[rowan.bradley 0]

Despite having used TMG for some time, I’m only now really trying to get to grips with TMG’s system for recording citations, sources and repositories, and set up my own standards for doing this throughout my database.

 

If (this is a real recent example) I’ve got the county record office that holds the original parish register of the church where my ancestor was married to send me a photocopy of the relevant page, and now I want to scan this and make it available in my database, what’s the right way to do this?

 

Is the source the original register, the photocopy, or the scan? Or all three?

 

Is the repository the County Record Office (where the original register is), or my filing cabinet (where the photocopy is), or a directory on my disk drive (where the scan is)?

 

Can I record the scan as an Exhibit? If so, what is the exhibit attached to? It does not seem possible to attach an exhibit to a citation. If the source is the whole of the parish register, then I might have 100 scans of different pages of it. If I make these exhibits attached to the source, then each citation will have 100 exhibits, and it won’t be clear which of them is relevant to this citation. It would, it seems to me, be most appropriate in this situation to have the exhibit attached to the citation, so only the relevant page comes up when a user is looking at the citation.

 

If, on the other hand, the source is this individual page of the register, then I can have the relevant exhibit attached to it, but I will need to create 100 different sources, each with a lot of duplicated information.

 

I hope someone can provide some advice! By the way, I need my standards configured to suit mostly UK records.

 

Thanks - Rowan

[Terry Reigel 0]

Is the source the original register, the photocopy, or the scan? Or all three?

Is the repository the County Record Office (where the original register is), or my filing cabinet (where the photocopy is), or a directory on my disk drive (where the scan is)?

I expect you will receive a number of viewpoints. My view is that your source is what you saw - the photo-copy. However, I regard photo-copies and online images as an alternate version of the original. So I would record the source as if I had seen the original, but add a note in Comments that I saw a copy supplied by the repository (or online image, if that were the case). Then be sure that the [Comments] source element is included in the Full Footnote Template. The Repository would be the repository of the original.

Can I record the scan as an Exhibit?

Yes, but why would you? What will be your output medium? You can attach exhibits to either Sources or to Citations. But if your output is to paper reports, they cannot be output. Even if they could, full-size exhibits aren't very workable in paper reports.

 

If they are for your reference from within TMG, I think that's the hard way. I recommend instead creating a good filing system on our computer and simply go fetch them there if you want to view it again.

 

The only reason I can see for attaching images of sources is if you intend to create a website that includes those exhibits as images. That can work well, but when you get several thousand sources it's quite a task to set them up.

If the source is the whole of the parish register, then I might have 100 scans of different pages of it. If I make these exhibits attached to the source, then each citation will have 100 exhibits, and it won't be clear which of them is relevant to this citation. It would, it seems to me, be most appropriate in this situation to have the exhibit attached to the citation, so only the relevant page comes up when a user is looking at the citation.

This is a two-part question. First, do you want to "split" your Sources in TMG so that each record is recorded as a separate Source, or "lump" them and record the details in the Citation Details field? You will find proponents of each approach, and most users do a bit of one and a bit of the other, I think. Then, If you are going to attach exhibits of the sources (which, as I said above , only makes sense if you are going to create a website), how to do it? The problem with attaching the exhibits to citations is most sources are cited for a number of Tags, in some cases dozens. Attaching the exhibit to the citations in each of them seems like a lot of work to me.

 

I urge you think about whether you really want to undertake attaching images of all your sources to your project.