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While some Digital Collections (such as NYPL) may have a citation section that will auto-generate with detail and information about a collection, there can be errors in the information. This can especially occur in historical newspaper citation generation. Many older newspaper articles didn't have titles, so databases may pull up part of a first line, or a listing of topics, as a "title." Also, many newspaper articles are read by machines, which won't auto correct for issues such as capitalization.
For example, ProQuest Historical Newspapers auto-cites this article in MLA format as:
"TO STAGE TWO PLAYS FOR JUDGE'S VERDICT." New York Times (1857-1922), Aug 06, 1912, pp. 9. ProQuest, http://ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/97301706?accountid=10226.
The actual article title is depicted as such in the original paper (note: for accessible form of article, click here for the original ProQuest link):
Except this article has two other hidden articles further down the page. My search term was "Mae West," and she does show up but only in that last small stub on the week's theatre productions:
When auto-generated citations go wrong like in the above examples, it's best to go back to basics and use the core elements to create a citation - it's not as hard as it seems!
The MLA Style Center has a great interactive template to create your own citation, as well as examples for each type of resource. Using the elements and knowing the formula lets you build a citation easily.
Using these elements, a better-looking citation for our example source above might look instead like this:
