How to cite
This archive is built to be cited. Every entry has a stable identifier that does not change once assigned, so a citation made today still resolves to the same record later. Cite an individual entry as a primary-source reference, or cite the whole collection as a dataset. Both forms are below.
The stable-identifier scheme
Every record carries an accession-style identifier of the form TYPE-CASE-NNN. It is permanent: once an identifier is assigned to a record it is never reused or reassigned, even if the record is later revised. That is what makes a citation durable.
| Segment | Values | Meaning |
|---|---|---|
| TYPE | SITE, PERSON, DOC, ART, EVT, OHS | The record type: site, person, document, artifact, event, oral history. |
| CASE | AS, HX, TX | Anshan, Houston, or a Texas-wide record. |
| NNN | 001, 002, … | A zero-padded sequence within that type and case, assigned in order of accession. |
So OHS-AS-001 is the first oral history accessioned on the Anshan side, and SITE-HX-002 is the second Houston site. The identifier is shown on every catalog record and resolves to the URL items/<IDENTIFIER>.html. When the archive is hosted at a permanent domain, each identifier becomes a stable URL of the form <archive-domain>/items/<IDENTIFIER>.
Cite a single entry
Use the entry's title, its identifier, the archive, the version, and the year. Every item page prints a ready-to-copy citation line at the bottom of the record. The general form:
Contributor or editor. “Entry Title.” Steel & Oil: Anshan–Houston Industrial Memory Archive, IDENTIFIER, version 0.2. Accessed DD Month YYYY. <archive-domain>/items/IDENTIFIER.
Worked example (Chicago note form):
Tim Qiao, ed. “A 1950s Angang worker: sent-down youth, shop-floor apprentice, then office.” Steel & Oil: Anshan–Houston Industrial Memory Archive, OHS-AS-102, version 0.2. Accessed 6 June 2026. <archive-domain>/items/OHS-AS-102.
For an entry contributed by someone other than the editor, the contributor is the author and the editor is named after the archive title (“ed. Tim Qiao”).
Cite the whole archive
To cite the collection as a dataset, for example when it informed a study in aggregate:
Tim Qiao, ed. Steel & Oil: Anshan–Houston Industrial Memory Archive. Version 0.2. The Village School, Houston, Texas, 2026. Dataset, 94 entries. <archive-domain>.
The full record set is available as archive.csv and archive.json under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, so a citing study can deposit the exact version it used.
Versioning and permanence
The archive carries a version number (currently 0.2 (first field collection)). Entries are added between versions; identifiers are never reused. When a record is corrected, the correction is noted on the record and the identifier stays the same, so an older citation still points to the right entry and a reader can see what changed. A citation should name the version it used.
A note on permanence, honestly stated. A truly permanent citation needs a persistent identifier (a DOI or an ARK) issued by a registrar, and a long-term host such as a university library. This sample uses the stable internal scheme above and is structured so that a DOI or ARK can be minted per entry and per release when the archive is deposited with an institution. Until then, cite the version and keep a copy of the data release you used.
See also: Contribute an entry for how new identifiers are assigned, and Sources & standards for the sourcing rule behind every citable record.