Reference Book of the Week: Evidence Explained

Our History Librarian, Vicki Betts, ordered this book, and it caught my eye. So I knew I had to post about it here right away. This week we are featuring Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace. This book is a citation guide for history sources, but it is not just any old citation guide. This book is very helpful in explaining how to cite things that are a bit out of the ordinary. We are talking things like artifacts, objects, photos, and other things that you need to provide a reference, but the way of making the reference is not easy or readily available. The book is also a guide for how to work with various historical sources. The book starts with a section on evidence analysis. Here you can learn about issues like types of sources (definitive, direct, and indirect sources for example), transcriptions versus translations, authenticity of a source, and even a bit of legal terminology that history researchers may use. The second section is on fundamentals of citation, which is basically an excellent overview of citation style and practices. This section contains the building blocks for the rest of the book. The rest of the book is then devoted to sections on different sources such as church records, cemetery records, and archives and artifacts. The book provides a lot of sample citations that a researcher can use as a model when writing a citation for that birth record he or she found in some archive in a small church in a small Texas town. This book is extremely detailed, and it is also very up-to-date covering everything from artifacts to websites with about a thousand citation examples. And if there is no sample citation, there is enough guidance to help you create an effective citation. If you are a historical researcher or genealogist, you need to look at this book. Our copy of the book Evidence Explained is kept in the ready reference area. Remember, those are the shelves behind the reference desk. The call number for the book is D 5 .M55 2007.