tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527613590529958801.post2688019694810947965..comments2024-03-21T19:08:05.737-07:00Comments on Genealogy's Star: I Respectfully DisagreeJames Tannerhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02989059644120454647noreply@blogger.comBlogger7125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527613590529958801.post-9607454111228111002014-08-25T17:16:13.223-07:002014-08-25T17:16:13.223-07:00What you describe may be the case with a book that...What you describe may be the case with a book that has been changed to text, but many online books are PDF copies of the original paper book, such as those on Google Books. The two books I use as examples above are the same PDF copy of the same book on two websites. James Tannerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02989059644120454647noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527613590529958801.post-38629636856146061922014-08-25T13:42:21.428-07:002014-08-25T13:42:21.428-07:00My understanding is that the online provider is no...My understanding is that the online provider is not just like a library because they may be providing a digital copy that is someway changed from the original published book. There are so many mistakes in scanning. For example, pages can be left out or covered up. If you don't know who made the digital copy available, you can't look at it and figure out if it is truly an exact copy or not. Because there are so many organizations doing the scanning, we do get books that are exactly the same and the only visible difference may be that one still had that referenced map inside the back cover and the other doesn't. I think the controversy is caused because a digital provider can be a mix of "publisher" and "library". We are trying to classify something as an apple or an orange when really it's kind of a rambutan.J. Heuernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527613590529958801.post-21383234265850321222014-08-24T19:40:18.320-07:002014-08-24T19:40:18.320-07:00Good idea and comment. I don't think you can p...Good idea and comment. I don't think you can put in too much. I suggest a digitized copy of the title page and a link to the original online document if one exists.James Tannerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02989059644120454647noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527613590529958801.post-15734645285923993872014-08-24T16:37:52.217-07:002014-08-24T16:37:52.217-07:00While I basically agree that getting a citation of...While I basically agree that getting a citation of evident quality is important, I would ask - evident to who? If the audience skills level is mixed then the danger is that the sophisticated citation will be unintelligible to the average reader. It is not, for instance, remotely obvious that an italicised title means anything different from one in quotes. Why not write out in full what is meant? We don't need to save on disk space. We can use copy and paste. And if we wrote out a fuller story, then the need to decide whether Ancestry is a publisher or a repository might vanish if we just wrote the facts.Adrian Brucenoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527613590529958801.post-32347877562369973332014-08-24T08:27:39.894-07:002014-08-24T08:27:39.894-07:00Having a few high school students whose English te...Having a few high school students whose English teachers insist on proper MLA style bibliographies, we find ourselves coming to this web site often: https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/ for its discussion of MLA standards. Regarding an on-line book, its has this to say:<br /><br />“How do I cite a book that I accessed online in MLA? <br />“The following information comes from page 187 [how big is this “style sheet”?] of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. If you are citing a work on the Web that has a previous or concurrent publication in print, your citation should include the following: <br /><br />“1. Begin the entry as you would any book cited: Author Last Name, First name. Title of Book. Location of publisher: Name of publisher, year of publication. <br />For more information on this from the Purdue OWL, please click here. <br /><br />“2.Follow the above with the title of the database or Web site (in italics) where the book is hosted. <br /><br />"3. Include the medium of the publication consulted (Web) <br /><br />“4. Include the dates of access (DD Mth. YYYY)<br /><br /> “The following is an example from the MLA Handbook: <br /><br />"Cascardi, Anthony J. Ideologies of History in the Spanish Golden Age. University Park: Pennsylvania State UP, 1997. Pennsylvania State Romance Studies. Web. 12 Mar. 2007.”<br /><br />So the MLA style standard setters, whoever they are, consider an on-line source for a copy of a book as a repository, like a library, not a publisher. <br /><br />One side note, when our oldest was a high school freshman, you were also suppose to include the web address in the citation. By the time our third one was, that had been dropped in recognition of the fact that web addresses change so frequently.<br /><br />I have always thought that the main reason for including so much information in a citation was so other people can find the same work and check the information themselves. Including the publisher does help in that effort to track down a copy. Several years ago the only way I was able to obtain a copy of a book that had a lot of information about by wife’s family was to write directly to the publisher and buy one of their few remaining copies.<br /><br />Why include the web site at all? If the book was not scanned but rather typed in or, even worse, entered with OCR, there may be all sorts of typographical errors in the on-line version that you don’t want to be blamed for in the passages you quote.<br /> <br />You mention that including an image of a book page or document might just negate the need for any citation. Unfortunately, in these days of photoshop fakery, I doubt that will ever be the case.<br /><br />As a final side note, I think the issue with italics is that so often you can’t use them. I suspect when I paste this into your blog the italics in the above quote will vanish. Which is a shame. It was so nice that when computer word processing came along and one could go back to using real italics instead of having to underline titles when using a typewriter. Now a lot of online source data entry systems won’t let you do either.Gordon Colletthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10501621351412089615noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527613590529958801.post-5333802095450541722014-08-23T11:09:58.914-07:002014-08-23T11:09:58.914-07:00I agree with your comments. I am certainly not dis...I agree with your comments. I am certainly not disparaging a proper citation of authority. My point is that worry about citations should not deter people from researching their family history. As I noted, citations have their place but they are not the end product of our family history research. James Tannerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02989059644120454647noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1527613590529958801.post-57956866821676114332014-08-23T11:07:21.943-07:002014-08-23T11:07:21.943-07:00There's one other factor worth considering. A...There's one other factor worth considering. A big part of genealogy for me is sharing my work. When I've put all the effort in to do thorough research, I'd like people to view it with credibility. To do that the quality has to be self-evident. The source citations are a big part of that. A proper source citation helps demonstrate the care and attention I've put into the effort. It's like spelling errors. Spelling errors may not matter--the content is still there, but a lot of people will infer that a carelessly spelled write-up reflects careless work overall. For me, going to the extra effort to put a citation into the proper format is minor if it add credibility to my work. Maybe the citation format shouldn't matter, but it does to a lot of people.BFJohnhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10340181008213799502noreply@blogger.com