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ILL and citation
Dec. 15th, 2004 10:32 amNo deep thoughts, yet, but just something that occurred to me last night.
MLA. citations require that if you cite a downloaded journal article from a database, the database information is part of your citation. E.g.
Giles, Rupert. "Cataloguing occult books without raising demons." Biblioteksbladet. June 1998: 23-69. Library and Information Science Abstracts. Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. University of California, Sunnydale, 15 December 2004. <http://www.csa.com>.
But if you order an article for your library's interlibrary loan service, you actually have no way of knowing (depending on the offering library, anyway) whether they send some student worker off to photocopy the page from the physical journal or whether they're just giving you a page image PDF which they printed out for you, downloaded from their own online databases.
So either the location from which you downloaded your local copy of the article doesn't matter, in which case it is just extra information in the citation taking up space, or it does matter, in which case you can't have an accurate citation for anything you obtained through interlibrary loan. This isn't that interesting a thought -- citations are flawed all the time. Heck, some people don't even bother to spell the authors' names correctly. But it does make me wonder whether a complete citation of something obtained in a copy or printout through interlibrary loan -- that is, without its complete provenance known -- should include as much of the provenance information as you know. That is "Obtained via interlibrary loan from Miskatonic University." After all, when you're citing a database accessed through a university, you put the name of the university in the citation, as I get above.
MLA. citations require that if you cite a downloaded journal article from a database, the database information is part of your citation. E.g.
Giles, Rupert. "Cataloguing occult books without raising demons." Biblioteksbladet. June 1998: 23-69. Library and Information Science Abstracts. Cambridge Scientific Abstracts. University of California, Sunnydale, 15 December 2004. <http://www.csa.com>.
But if you order an article for your library's interlibrary loan service, you actually have no way of knowing (depending on the offering library, anyway) whether they send some student worker off to photocopy the page from the physical journal or whether they're just giving you a page image PDF which they printed out for you, downloaded from their own online databases.
So either the location from which you downloaded your local copy of the article doesn't matter, in which case it is just extra information in the citation taking up space, or it does matter, in which case you can't have an accurate citation for anything you obtained through interlibrary loan. This isn't that interesting a thought -- citations are flawed all the time. Heck, some people don't even bother to spell the authors' names correctly. But it does make me wonder whether a complete citation of something obtained in a copy or printout through interlibrary loan -- that is, without its complete provenance known -- should include as much of the provenance information as you know. That is "Obtained via interlibrary loan from Miskatonic University." After all, when you're citing a database accessed through a university, you put the name of the university in the citation, as I get above.
