The Trouble with Citing Sites

How to create a "Webliography"

Walter Minkel -- School Library Journal, 7/1/2000

Teaching students how to cite sources properly and use correct bibliographic formats in their research papers has always been awkward. Debbie Abilock, the librarian at California's Nueva School, says, "Young children--and perhaps everyone--are daunted by the picky part of citing. The stupid format drives us nuts!" It's even more awkward nowadays with the Net shoving its enormous nose into teachers' and librarians' lives. Added to the anal-retentive--oops, I mean detailed--work of teaching students how to create bibliographic citations for books, periodicals, and other library materials is the trickier task of teaching them to cite Web sites, e-mail messages, and other bits and pieces that don't exist in hard-copy form--and keep changing.

We also live in a culture that encourages students to simply grab what they want from the Net without thinking about who it belongs to--look at the Napster controversy. When I worked as a public librarian, I frequently saw students copying pictures and text from the Web for their papers without thinking about credit. It's our job, as librarians and teachers, to give them a heads-up.

Abilock--co-creator of some nice bibliographic "helper" tools with her programmer son, Damon, for the Noodletools site at www.noodletools.com--feels that we must lay some groundwork before we teach kids how to "give credit." "One builds a culture," she says, "of giving 'credit' to others' work" throughout a school's program. For example: " 'Thanks to Aenea, who worked to figure out the math in our group.�?�' We give her credit for what we used, and what helped us."

First we show kids why it's important to give credit; next we show how. I visited the Modern Language Association Web site at www.mla.org (MLA's citation style is standard in many schools), and clicked my way through "MLA Style" to the page called "Documenting Sources from the World Wide Web."

Once you read the examples there, you quickly realize how difficult it can be for younger students to cite sites. The first thing the style guide tells you to cite in a Web-site bibliographic entry is "Name of the author, editor, compiler, or translator of the source (if available and relevant)." The key phrase here is "if available and relevant," because anyone who spends time on the Web knows that the source of a particular bit of information is often about as easy for a student to find as a speck of dust in a tornado.

First we show kids why it's important to give credit; next we show how.

Let's say I'm a student who wants to find a map of the positions of the armies at the beginning of the Battle of Gettysburg. I locate one: www.militaryhistoryonline.com/gettysburg/day1/getty11.htm. I copy the map graphic to save to a disk; I also copy a couple of quotes to cite in my description of the battle. My teacher told me this means I'm required to cite this page in my bibliography. But who gets the author credit? The page's sponsor, Military History Online (MHO)? I went to the MHO home page and found, in small type at the bottom, "Battle of Gettysburg site created by Brian Williams for MilitaryHistoryOnline.com." Does this mean that Williams wrote the page from which I copied the map and quotes? Probably, but it's not stated clearly, as it would be in a book or periodical.

The CNN home page, or any other news page, or any page that compiles e-mail or discussion group messages, changes by the hour. The date we find a quotation on a Web page is essential, and the MLA site tells us to add that date, as well as the "last updated" date of a page, to our citation.

Another new wrinkle that technology adds to bibliographies is how to credit work from "subscription services." The MLA style guide says that we need to add the service's and the subscribing library's name if we grab an article from a database like Infotrac or ProQuest. It drives us all--students, teachers, and librarians--bonkers, but we need to stress to students, over and over, the importance of identifying sources and checking their accuracy. Bibliographic style, painful as it is, is the way we give others credit for what we used, and what helped us.