In early 1998, I wrote two articles for Genealogical Computing on
the subject of citing online sources. The first article focused on Web
pages, while the second article covered electronic messages (such as e-mail
and message boards). At that time, the Modern Language Association (MLA) had
not yet published updated citation guidelines for online sources, and the
latest Chicago Manual of Style (the 14th ed.) was five years old. A new
edition of the Chicago Manual of Style has yet to appear, but the MLA has
since published the second edition of its MLA Style Manual and Guide to
Scholarly Publishing, and the fifth edition of its MLA Handbook for Writers
of Research Papers. For genealogists who like to use MLA style for their
writing, and for maintaining the citations in their genealogical databases,
these new editions become the standard for citing of Web pages and other
electronic information.
Citing electronic publications appears as section 6.9 of the MLA Style
Manual, and section 4.9 of the MLA Handbook. For this article, I'll refer to
the MLA Handbook, but the contents of the two books are essentially the same.
The basic concepts of citing online sources has not changed, although some
of the details have. For instance, when citing Web pages, you have always
been advised to include two different dates in the citation: the date on
which the Web page was published, and the date on which you yourself last
accessed the page. The reasoning behind this is that Web pages, unlike
printed sources, may be updated from time to time, and so someone using your
citation may not be looking at exactly the same page that you were looking
at. By your providing the date on which you last accessed the page, you are
warning anyone else that they may find something quite different, especially
if the current publication date is more recent than the date you say that you
looked at the page.
In my previous article, I advised putting your date of access to the page at
the end of the citation, in parentheses, based upon the recommendation of
Janice R. Walker, a former instructor at the University of South Florida in
Tampa and co-author of The Columbia Guide to Online Style. MLA now
recommends that the date on which you access the page should be placed prior
to the page's URL. Let me provide an example. Suppose that you have decided
to access one of my personal Web pages, and you'd like to cite it in your
genealogical database or in a printed family history. The title of the page
is Drew Smith. I'm the author. The URL for the page is
home.tampabay.rr.com/drewsmith/. The page was last updated on
23 September 1999. You last accessed it on 2 May 2001. The full citation
might look like this:
Smith, Drew. Drew Smith. 23 Sept. 1999. 2 May 2001 <http://home.tampabay.rr.com/drewsmith/>.
As with any other citation, you begin with the author, if you know who it is.
Next comes the title of the page (either underlined or italicized depending
on your preferences). Then you have the date of publication (again, if you
know it). Finally, you put the date on which you last accessed the page,
immediately followed by the URL of the page.
In future articles, I'll provide examples of other online citation problems.
Drew Smith is an instructor with the School of Library and Information
Science at the University of South Florida in Tampa. He is also a regular
contributor to the quarterly journal Genealogical Computing, where he writes
the "Cybrarian" column. He can be reached at drewsmith@aol.com.
Digital Genealogy
