[Air-l] citing a podcast

[David Brake]

On 1 Aug 2006, at 21:01, air-l-request at listserv.aoir.org wrote:

>> Negroponte, N. (2006) "Ted Talk: Nicholas Negroponte". in New York,
>> February, 2006,   http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/
>>
>> But that doesn't tell you it is a podcast and crucially it doesnt
>> tell you that the part I cited is 5 minutes, 42 seconds in.

> I think that David's question worthwhile, and it comes up in citing
> blogs and other electronic media as well. In fact, we have earlier
> threads here, I believe, about whether citations to web sites should
> be by site, or by individual page, or some other indicator.
>
> I think what is most important about a citation is findability. So,
> generally, if I can find the resource at a URL, I'll list the URL. But
> given the capriciousness of URLs, more information is often needed as
> a "backup," if this original citation fails.
>
> For net resources I *expect* are likely to change, I have often
> considered citing a copy of the page archived by the Internet Archive,
> or my archived copy of the page. Or, alternatively, provide a link to
> a copy of the bibliography that can be automatically or manually
> updated. If the latter were used, it could also provide something like
> a trackback mechanism to do links forward.

These are interesting issues as well, but not really what I was  
asking. My problem is that the electronic resource in question is not  
a web page but a podcast. It is in this case as likely to be  
permanently available as a web page would be but in other cases with  
podcasts the only way to provide a URL would be to open the RSS feed  
and look for the address of the MP3 file there and some podcasts  
don't retain complete archives (does archive.org try to archive all  
old podcasts?). It also seems to me important to indicate that the  
reference is internet-distributed audio not a web page and, as  
mentioned above, it seemed to me it would be best to have some  
standard way to indicate that the particular text cited came a  
certain part of the way in (just as one might do with a page number  
in a book or journal article).
---
David Brake, Doctoral Student in Media and Communications, London  
School of Economics & Political Science
<http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/media@lse/study/ 
mPhilPhDMediaAndCommunications.htm>
Also see http://davidbrake.org/ (home page), http://blog.org/  
(personal weblog) and http://get.to/lseblog (academic groupblog)
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