archive citations for history research

[jbg]

Hi. I'm a PhD student in history, considering Bookend for reference
management. My main concern is the ability to handle citations of
archival materials. Every archive has their own standards for
citations, which tends to include information on location, date
visited, name of archive, name of collection, box number, folder
numbers, etc. Even within the same archive, various collections might
require slightly different ways of citing them.

Most historians I know manually enter all archival citations. It seems
that there should be some way to automate this, at least partially. I
found some old discussions on this forum about the issue, but they may
be out of date at this point. I'd love to hear your experiences
creating many special citation types. It'd be helpful if any of you
have comparisons to other reference software to offer.

Thanks!

[Jon]

I'll let others answer your questions about using Bookends for archival material. I will point out, however, that you can create your own reference Types (with appropriate labels for the fields) and corresponding formats that output the information in any order you want. If you want more details, the user guide (Help menu) is the best source, and you can email me if you want pointers (support@sonnysoftware.com).

Jon
Sonny Software

[aechallu]

I prefer to avoid using the automated citation features for archival sources, essentially because you'd need to tweak almost each of them and once they are a "field" that gets messy. But BE is great for handling your notes, so this is what I've done until very recently:
1- A bibliography database from which I cite using all the automated citation features (command-Y, scan, etc)
2- A primary-source database that I use to keep notes and search information. I created a citation format for a standard archival citation, then I insert RTF citations using command-K instead of command-Y. Command-K inserts citations as "text" not as "fields". That means it's easier to edit them, but they do not automatically update when you rescan the document.

This system has worked very well for me. More recently, though I replaced -2- with Evernote simply on grounds of helping with synchronization stuff, but the BE setup worked out very, very well.

I hope this helps!