ILL and citation

[deborah]

No 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.

Comments

[cnoocy]

Should you put the date of the loan in, as well? Should a later researcher be able to find out who gave you the copy of Alhazred '74 with the extra paragraph inserted, or is that overkill?

[deborah]

Aiyee! Yes... but at some point you need to draw a line, where you think the odds of difference are unlikely.

Alas, within 15 years we'll probably just put in the RFID tag of the source and be done with it. Then, when the paper is done, we'll go home to our apartments which will unlock when they sense our presence, and we'll participate in corporatation-approved and -monitored recreational activities.

[leppanen.livejournal.com]

That's a really interesting point I never thought of. If a college library gets credited in a citation for having electronic access to an article, it makes sense that the ILL service that supplies the article should in some way be credited. As I flash back to my days spent in front a photocopier in ILL I can't help but think that ILL service could be more properly credited in research.

[deborah]

I wasn't thinking of it as an issue of credit, though that's an interesting thing to think about. News librarians are often credited in news stories if they do enough research.

[cavlec.livejournal.com]

I guess my question is what the point of a citation is. My sense has always been that it's sufficient information for someone reading the biblio to find the source for herself.

I don't see the use of provenance info, be it ILL or database, given that we all get info from various sources in various ways. Who got this stuff into the citation standard? The database vendors?

[bookishfellow.livejournal.com]

I guess my question is what the point of a citation is. My sense has always been that it's sufficient information for someone reading the biblio to find the source for herself.

You haven't been doing research in the physical sciences, have you? A lot of times our chem patrons will come to us with nothing more than Snape (1977) for a citation, because that's all they had in their article's reference list.

Bigger picture, I believe there'll eventually be some sort of paradigm shift in citation styles as more and more information becomes format-independent. The whole cite-your-online-source thing (including access date, URL etc.) is a reactive adjustment to the idea that web sites and database coverage change over time; nobody's quite gotten a handle on the fact that the individual article doesn't change just because a db has added or dropped it from the selection. And as more things are published exclusively online, the articles themselves may no longer be static. Citation styles are playing catch-up, and probably will be for quite some time to come.

[cavlec.livejournal.com]

Heh. No, I'm a sloppy humanist. :) And author-plus-year is unconscionably Not Enough.

But yes, I agree with your bigger picture entirely.

[deborah]

My rule would be: decide how much you need to find the exact copy of the article, where change in the quoted / used piece and it's context are likely only by the oddest of chance (printing error, for example). Use no more information than that in your citation. So is this info necessary, or not?

[deborah]

Though a PDF and a text represntation of an article do differ; the plain text is missing charts, illustrations, and layout. Do we care which one was used in the paper? I'd argue that if it's a PDF page image, we could care less whether it was electronically obtained, and from where. If it's a plain text conversion, we care.

As for non-static articles, that's why MLA requires date last viewed in the citation.