Telstar

Double standards

My last post considered the issues of referencing a web resource. In this post I’m going to start bringing in other types of resource that you might reference – books, journals, articles, etc. – but I’m going to come from a slightly different direction, because I’ve started to come to the conclusion that there is a fundamental difference between referencing online and offline resources, and this is worth some consideration.

The difference that I percieve is the difference between a ‘reference’ and a ‘route of access’. A traditional reference to a printed book (or indeed, any offline resource) might look something like this:

Lipson, C. (2006) Cite right, Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c2006.

Whereas a reference to an e-book looks like:

Bronte, C. (1998) Jane Eyre, Project Gutenberg, [Online] Available from: http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm (Accessed 27 August 2009)

What’s the difference? The latter not only includes the information necessary to identify the resource, but also a route of access to the resource (by providing the URL).

[To digress for a moment, there may be some question of whether it is necessary to include a URL in the reference, or a URI – the difference being that a URI only has to identify a resource, not provide a location – as opposed to a URL which:

“refers to the subset of URIs that, in addition to identifying a resource, provide a means of locating the resource by describing its primary access mechanism (e.g., its network “location”).” (http://labs.apache.org/webarch/uri/rfc/rfc3986.html#URLvsURN)

I know this seems counter-intuitive to those of us who type URLs into our browser everyday and expect to get a webpage back, but some things that look like URLs don’t actually resolve to anything when put in a browser, and they can still count as URIs.]

Anyway, when citing a webpage clearly there is a reason to include the URL – it is probably the only practical way of identifying the webpage in a way that someone else could reliably find it. But what about other references – such as e-books? The following is a valid e-book reference:

Willie, Sarah Susannah (2003) Acting black: college, identity and the performance of race, Taylor & Francis e-book collection, [Online] Available from: http://library.open.ac.uk/linking/index.php?id=311027 (Accessed 10 April 2006)

This contains the information to identify the book, and also the route of access. Not only that, but for most of you out there (those not a member of staff or a student with the Open University) this link almost certainly won’t give you access to the item. It seems to me that this is analagous to me writing the equivalent print reference:

Willie, Sarah Susannah (2003) Acting black: college, identity and the performance of race, New York, Routledge Available from: 378.1981 WIL Main Library, Level 4, University of Durham Libraries (Accessed 10 April 2006)

It is just as true, and just as useless to most readers. The difference being that the latter is not accepted practice for print publications.

Further to this, you note that this item is available both as an e-book, and as a printed volume. Would it matter which the reader went to – almost certainly not. This seems analogous to a reference differentiating between hardback and softback printed editions (which they don’t) – although I can see there may be some issues with pagination should you reference a specific page.

So what is the solution? My own opinion is that the only sensible way of handling links related to this type of material is to use OpenURLs and ‘Link Resolver’ software to allow the linking of reference to resources. By doing this, you allow the question of ‘where can I access this’ to be answered individually for each user, rather than suggest there is a single answer for an e-book, an e-journal or an e-article. By I’d be interested to here what others think?