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Coding for Source Citations

Replies: 10

Re: Coding for Source Citations

Posted: 29 Jul 2014 1:43PM GMT
Classification: Query
Edited: 29 Jul 2014 3:30PM GMT
Donald,

First it needs to be pointed out that the definition of "Citation" as it pertains to GEDCOM is very different than "Citation" with regard to academic and scholarly papers. A citation in GEDCOM is not complete and formatted to the standards set out in (for example) the Chicago Style, MLA or Elizabeth Shown Mills. To build a citation to these standards you need to pull information from multiple records in GEDCOM not just the "source_citation" tag-set.

EDIT: GEDCOM has it's own "Style" that has many of the components of the other styles but not all.

Second, the GEDCOM "Style" is somewhat lax in the way they specifically support online resources. This is to say that they don’t define their tags with regard to the vast amount of “sourcing” people do today via online resources. So you have to be a little creative to make it work.

Third, most software programs put little or no thought into creating good GEDCOM and never collaborate in the grey areas of creating good GEDCOM, sourcing being one example.

As a reader of the GEDCOM specification then you are very aware of the definition of the tag SOUR.PUBL (but for those that are not familiar with the definition) GEDCOM tag PUBL has the following definition:

"SOURCE_PUBLICATION_FACTS:
When and where the record was created. For published works, this includes information such as the city of publication, name of the publisher, and year of publication. For an unpublished work, it includes the date the record was created and the place where it was created. For example, the county and state of residence of a person making a declaration for a pension or the city and state of residence of the writer of a letter."

With this being said the information that goes into the SOUR.PUBL tag for a published work should be , not in any particular order:

1) city of publication
2) name of publisher
3) year of publication

The GEDCOM specification does not detail the specifics of any sub-tags for the PUBL tag therefore you can not, via GEDCOM, find specifically the "city", "publisher" or "year" information as it relates to the source material.

In my opinion the "Publisher" of a census is not Ancestry.com but the government agency that the census was produced by/for, but this is just my thought. Ancestry.com is the "presenter" of the image. For example, the following template for the scholarly paper citation could be:

Online presenter, "name of Image and description" type of image, Name of Website (Online: online publisher, online publish date), specific page number or citation within the website, url or image, (original publisher, original publish date), web page accessed date.

So from the SOUR.PUBL tag you would only gather the information for the “Original Publisher” and “Original Publish Date” in the above example.

The “page” information can only come from the EVEN.SOUR.PAGE tag.

The Online Publisher information and website name should come from the “Repository”. REPO.NAME,

This is a record type that is rarely used but is specific to “Where the document was found” for example a library or online location.

The type of media (type of image) comes from the SOUR.REPO.CALN.MEDI tag

Yes you can make the Source record be Ancestry source, but the information can be found in other places so I don’t like doing it this way.

In Conclusion: The scholarly citation, the written footnote, end note, or bibliography data can come from 3 different places.

1) ???.EVEN.SOUR (for example: an individual/family record event source tag)
2) SOURce Record
3) Repository

Depending on the type of source and the citation style you are using the order that they are put together will change. So you can’t just plop it in one field and expect that to be your “citation”. I have not outlined all tags that can be used to create a complete scholarly citation, but I’m sure that if you look at the GEDCOM standard you can pick them out. I don’t expect any software company to do it the same way that any other company does it. So comparing them is just going to make your head spin.

Since I have my own software that is not commercially available I follow the GEDCOM more specifically and were grey areas occur I try to follow the spirit of GEDCOM, if not the exact letter. Since the letter does not encompass every modern possibility.
SubjectAuthorDate Posted
Donald Fritze 27 Jul 2014 8:39PM GMT 
kj_norway 27 Jul 2014 10:16PM GMT 
kj_norway 27 Jul 2014 10:39PM GMT 
Donald Fritze 29 Jul 2014 6:00PM GMT 
kj_norway 29 Jul 2014 7:43PM GMT 
DavidNewton31 29 Jul 2014 9:39PM GMT 
kj_norway 29 Jul 2014 10:37PM GMT 
Donald Fritze 30 Jul 2014 12:57PM GMT 
kj_norway 30 Jul 2014 2:44PM GMT 
Donald Fritze 7 Aug 2014 12:13AM GMT 
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