How do I add "marginal" labels to bibliography entries in Microsoft Word?

Question

I'm currently in the process of finalizing my research for the City Council of Rochester: Police Accountability Board. Of course (when conducting research), one must provide citations/bibliography entries to substantiate any claim that's made.

Nevertheless, I'm primarily concerned with the format of my bibliography; I want to add labels to each bibliography entry, as seen here on page 2 https://roccitylibrary.org/wp-content/uploads/Rochester-African-American-History-Final.pdf, where each entry is preceded with its corresponding call-number. How do I do this in Microsoft Word?

I've tried using the Table format, Bullet format, indenting, altering the Paragraph format etc-- all was of no avail.

Answer 1

Use a Paragraph Style with a marginal Frame.

The way I would do this would be to use Frames to insert the marginal entries in the Bibliography in the Final Copy. Word does not have an automatic method of doing this. If you have to update the bibliography after you add these, they will be lost. If you need to do that, I would recommend saving a copy and then copying and pasting the old entries into the updated copy and doing further manual updating.

Here is Word MVP Suzanne Barnhill's page on using Frames for Marginal Text. Here is my page on Frames and Textboxes.

The basic idea is to create a custom paragraph style that includes frame formatting and use that style for your marginal text. I have styles for both the left and right margins on my system. Note, though, that these do not switch if the location of the basic bibliography entry moves from a left column to a right column.

Frames can be created using the Format > Frame commands on the Style definition. They can also be created using the legacy command on the Developer Tab as discussed in the linked pages.

By the way, your sample was almost certainly set up using Tables. Here is my page on Tables.