Best Practices for Citations and Evidence

Telling stories is great fun. Great storytellers have a knack for rounding out the details to make a story especially dramatic, suspenseful and even silly. Stories told to entertain may not be entirely truthful, which is fine because they’re just fun. Stories told to document history, are another matter entirely.

How YOU use your pictures, albums, and accounts are your business. We find that when getting serious to use pictures to support historical accounts, it’s helpful to reference best practices the professionals use when making citations or making your pictures available for the historical citations of others.

In this area, we have great respect for Elizabeth Shown Mills and the community she’s built around her genealogical citation bible, Evidence Explained and the forum on her website at EvidenceExplained.com.

Her approach recommends both a complete title, description, and link, plus the specification of the date in which it was accessed. We look forward to getting to know the community in the forums at EvidenceExplained to gain insight as to best practices for citing Ponga pictures.

Another useful tool is the CitationMachine at Chegg. Though designed for students preparing term papers, it can be a useful way to capture the expected form for citations.

For this image above, for example, the CitationMachine would recommend this approach:

"Dorothy In A Mystery Car." Digital image. Ponga. Accessed July 28, 2019. https://www.ponga.com/d2b36d109c201239#.

Ponga pictures are more than images, so we’re eager to work with experts to refine a best practice. Let us know if you have some insight or would like to know as best practices come together.

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