Hopefully this gets easier with practice: a possibly academic exercise in citing a microfilmed scrapbook

I spent a good hour trying to figure out how to cite one of the documents I received from the North Dakota State University (NDSU) Library Archives after locating it in the index. Here's the index entry:

"North Dakota Biography Index," database, NDSU Library Archives (http://library.ndsu.edu/db/biography/ : accessed 19 April 2014), entry for Mrs. John Ringquist.

I ordered a copy of the files from the archivist and received two newspaper clippings in PDF. They document a tragic accident that killed my 2nd great grandmother Anna (Nelson/Nilsdotter) Ringquist. They also provide information on her birth date, marriage year, church attendance, her female children's spouses as of 1924, and a hint as to her burial location. Less concretely, the provide a glimpse into the hard life of a homesteader and a woman who was a pillar of her small community. I'll probably talk more about Mrs. John Ringquist in a future blog post.

Figuring out how to cite the newspaper clippings took me a long time, probably because I tried to start at the wrong end - I skimmed through the templates in my database software and got more and more confused. What is a collection? A manuscript? Just "filling in the blanks" clearly wasn't working for me.

So I went back to the beginning. What is the purpose of citing sources? According to Evidence Explained [1], the purpose is two-fold: (1) To record the location so I or someone else can find it later, but also (2) to "record details that affect the use or evaluation of that data" (p. 43). Based on the index information above, I looked up the "publication" in Worldcat: North Dakota Necrology and started from the top - highest abstraction to lowest:

1. NDSU Archives is a repository for books and microfilms of interest to North Dakota history
2. They hold an archival microfilm of Necrology--North Dakota, 1920-1926 - the original book is held by the State Archives.
3. Necrology--North Dakota, 1920-1926 appears to be a bound, unpublished manuscript with hand-written page numbers and notations
4. I received digital copies of page 122 and 128 from Vol. 4 of the manuscript.
5. Those pages contain newspaper clippings with the subject, newspaper names, and publication date hand-written above each article.

It's pretty clear, now, what information I should convey. The first footnote would be something like:

"Ringquist, Mrs. John, Sheyenne Star Farmers Provost, New Rockford-N.D., 23 October 1924," North Dakota Necrology, vol. 4, p. 122; NDSUA microfilm CT253.N42 1996; digital photocopy provided by North Dakota State University Archives, Fargo.

I think this conveys not just where to find this (the NDSU Archives) but also what document I am actually looking at - a digital copy of a microfilm of a newspaper clipping.

This exercise may turn out to be purely academic, because I suspect what I'm supposed to do at this point is try to track down the original article context from the Sheyenne Star Farmers Provost...

[1] Mills, Elizabeth Shown. Evidence Explained: Citing History Sources from Artifacts to Cyberspace. Baltimore, Maryland: Genealogical Publishing Company, 2012.