Ramblings on Librarianship, Technology, and Academia

3/12/08 03:52 pm - mostly links, a few thoughts. Lawrence Lessig, librarything, Major league baseball, Stephen Colbert

Some library, book, archives, records, baseball fandom, and government information musings and links just so I can clear the tabs out of my browser again: ( Cut to save your screen real estate )

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2/12/08 12:47 pm - Fannish courtesies and real-life transparencies

( Unpopular acafannish opinions: why I don't ask for permission before citing fanworks )

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3/3/05 10:41 pm - supporting arguments

Interesting little side-effect of becoming a librarian: I go off on Internet rants far less often (less often?, you ask, if you know me. Well, yes. You should see how I used to be). Partly this is because I'm busier with new and fascinating things to learn -- I hadn't realised how bored I'd become with tech until I was in a field that inspired me again. But primarily it's because I know feel the need not to spout random bs, at least in print, unless I support it with cited facts. A desire not to let the side down, as it were.
( lengthy ramblings )

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12/15/04 10:32 am - ILL and citation

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.

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