I have a friend who is trying to cite a set of poetry flash cards in a literature paper. However, the cards apparently don’t count as ‘published’; they’re a manufactured item. So there are author names but no publishers. How can she write it up in a bibliography?
And how, in general, do you write bibliography entries for text that is unpublished? The list of dead soldier’s names on the Vietnam Memorial, for example?
The umbrella term for things like games, posters or flash cards is realia.
The Yale University Library has a web page dedicated to citing realia.
Your friend will probably wind up citing the flash cards in their Works Cited as:
Collection of flash cards for teaching poetry concepts.[COLOR=Black] *
Cardboard, 4x6" **
1995 ***[/COLOR]
In the text, the cite would be:
Fleas. Adam had 'em. (Flashcards)
This assumes they’re using MLA style. APA style cites are similar - the main difference comes up in the Reference List. An APA listing for the cards would be along the lines of:
Poetry Flashcards. (ca. 1995). Realia. Milton Bradley.
It’s pretty much the same information, just in a more formal structure.
Of course, the first question to ask is if your friend has tried plugging some distinctive text of the poem(s) into Google to see if the rest of the world knows the poem and who wrote it. It’s a pretty good assumption that the flashcards are not the true primary source.
Likewise the list of names that constitutes the Vietnam Veterans Memorial does not exist solely as what’s been carved into stone. The National Archives maintains the primary source. More info on the Vietnam War is available here.
Thank you for the detailed response, gotpasswords! I do believe the cards are in fact the primary source of their contents, as they are a work called The Alphamiricon, about which more can be read here.
My friend had to have her paper ready this morning, so she solved the problem by writing up the cite the way the cards were listed on the syllabus for the course. I haven’t seen the cards myself (she told me about her problem in IRC), and I don’t know if she was lacking the box they came in or what, but apparently no publisher information is printed on them. We figured out that searching for ‘Alphamiricon’ online would readily produce publisher information, though; so I guess mostly she was concerned with format.
Regarding the rules for citing realia, when I mentioned the Vietnam Veterans Memorial I was simply giving the best example I could come up with quickly for a well-known object with English written on it. I suppose cereal boxes or grave markers in general would have been better examples. I’ve checked out the Yale page you linked to, but it’s not quite clear from it that things written in stone are either realia or artifacts, and it doesn’t distinguish between the two terms. Also, I’m sure that there must be plenty of monuments out there that bear original text, and I’d love to see an example of an actually employed cite of such a monument. I’d still call my (and my friend’s) question answered though, so thank you again.
Why would not a set of flash cards have a publisher in the same way as a book does? It may well be a company which also publishes ordinary books, and almost certainly will be named either on the cards themselves or on the container that they come in.