[Air-l] A note on (online) bibliography

[Joseph Reagle]

Comments are welcome!

[[ http://reagle.org/joseph/blog/method/note-on-bibliography

2006 Oct 20 | A note on bibliography

   I'm sharing this note from the beginning of my dissertation so others
   working with online resources might comment.

     The type and number of bibliographic sources of this work merit a
     couple comments.

     First, most of the primary sources are online, and have only been
     online. Quotations from e-mail and most exclusively online
     resources have no page numbers associated with them.

     Second, many of the printed sources (primary and secondary) are now
     online. This is common in recent works where authors place versions
     of a print publication online, or where older works are now in the
     public domain and have been republished online. In such cases I use
     the publication date of the version I used. If necessary, I include
     the original publication date in prose adjacent to the reference,
     and I include it in the title of the work in the bibliography. For
     example the bibliographic entry for Project Gutenberg's 2004
     republication of H. G. Wells' "A Modern Utopia" would be:

     Wells, H. (2004). A modern utopia (1905). (6424). Retrieved on
     September 20, 2006 from <
     http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/mdntp10h.htm >.

     The page numbers associated with print-only sources obviously
     correspond to the printed page. For those sources that are also
     online, the page number might be associated with the pagination of
     the printed online resource from which I first took my notes, or
     the printed material, for which I later found an online copy. I
     believe it will be clear to the reader which is the case.

     Third, for some recent sources, there are many publications by the
     same author in the same year. After a couple of years of
     experimentation with the software I use to manage this material I
     have settled upon the convention of identifying such a source by
     appending a token to the publication year that is composed of the
     first three substantive words of the title. So, instead of using
     the letters [a-z], which some bibliographic systems use, my
     reference for Wikipedia's "Neutral Point of View" article is:
     (Wikipedia 2006npv). This provides stability across
     additions/subtractions to the bibliography and across chapters, and
     is comprehensible to the author and hopefully the reader.

     Finally, Web sources do change, particularly Wiki pages! Wherever
     possible I include the date of the version of the resource to which
     I am referring. Wikimedia resources are also identified by their
     versioned, "stable" or "permanent," URL. It is possible that I will
     reference different versions of the same Wiki page.

     All of this may sound confusing, and it was no easy task coming to
     this understanding, but in the end I hope it is useful. If the
     intention of bibliography is to permit the reader to follow the
     author's journey through the sources, the ready accessibility of
     online resources is a boon to all.


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