A proper citation of archival material includes information about the specific document
(author, title or other description of document, and date), the name of the collection,
location of the item within the collection (series and box or folio number), and location
of the collection (depository and city or Internet location).
In a paper, article or book for which scholarly citation is used, it is ordinarily
sufficient to cite the collection and depository in full only once in the first citation
to a document from the collection and again in the bibliography:
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/AldoLeopold [hereafter cited LP, for Leopold
Papers].
Thereafter, to cite individual documents in the collection, you may cite the actual
document (author, title or other description, and date) and use a short form for the
collection and the location of information in the collection. For example: Aldo Leopold,
USFS Diary, April 14-July 31, 1909, LP 7B1, p. 3 [for Leopold Papers, subseries 7, box 1,
p. 3.
This method of citation has the advantage of allowing you or a reader to locate the
original document in either the digital collection or the hard copy Leopold Papers in the
University of Wisconsin Archives. It is the method of citation used by most of the
scholars who have cited material from the Leopold Papers for the past four decades. The
only element of this citation that is unique to the digital collection is the page number
(p. 3), which allows one to go quickly to the digitized page cited. It should be noted,
however, that the page number alone is useless without the other location information (LP
7B1), as there are more than a hundred different series of page numbers in the nearly
100,000-page digital collection.
For a published item [e.g., Aldo Leopold, "The Conservation Ethic," Journal of Forestry 31:6 (Oct. 1933), p. 634-643], it is not ordinarily
necessary to cite the location in the collection because the journal can presumably be
found in major libraries. But recording this information (LP 6Bx, p. xx) in your notes
will make it much easier to find the original in order to check the accuracy of a
quotation.
It is not necessary to cite the date you accessed this collection, since it is a
permanent collection, and your citation, if you follow these guidelines, will also refer
to the actual physical location of the original in the University of Wisconsin Archives.