Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

I'm trying to close out many of my tabs, so I'm going to break this into two posts, one which is mostly about archival/open scholarship/library issues, and one which is about children's literature -- because I think my readership is kind of divided down the middle.

"diaries are a window into life of Kennedy daughter" was a story which really resonated with me as I struggle to learn the ethics of archivists. On the one hand, the diaries are an important part of the historical record, teaching us incredibly troubling things about Joe Kennedy in giving insights into many of the causes supported by Ted Kennedy and Eunice Kennedy Shriver. On the other hand, their potential for harm to (at the time) living people was not small.

• "Shrinking the Commons: Termination of Copyright Licenses and Transfers to the Public" : closing the loopholes in copyright law which might make GPL and Creative Commons-type licenses unenforceable


• "Newsflash: professor visits library" really gets at the heart of the problem libraries have, from my perspective, which is an utter failure of advertising. I don't know how many times people have told me about this great new service that allows them to e-mail or text in a question and get an answer back.


• Peter Sefton's comments on trying to understand Elsevier's license terms are truly hysterical.

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.