Cyblio... What?
RSSBy Meg McCaffrey -- School Library Journal, 12/01/2004
Cybliography. That's a legitimate word, right? Well, it will be if librarian Laurie Murrell and her students at Fieldstone Middle School in Montvale, NJ, have anything to say about it. They are trying to get their made-up word into the dictionary.
Several eighth-grade students coined the term "cybliography" last year, when Murrell pointed out that no word existed for citing digitized documents and Internet sources in a report. "Bibliography" wasn't the correct term, she told her students, because it refers only to book citations. Instead, Murrell suggested that they list their Web resources under the heading "Works Cited." That didn't cut it with the kids.
Now, Murrell and her students have a Web site (www.montvale.k12.nj.us/cybliography.htm) devoted to the word, and they're hoping that it catches on nationwide. They've even embarked on a letter-writing campaign, asking newspapers, television stations, and schools to encourage the adoption of cybliography.
"As long as people start using it, it will get into the dictionary," says Murrell, who, by the way, prefers the job title "cybrarian" to library media specialist. "If 'bling bling' can make it in, surely there's room for cybliography." Fair enough. Words tend to make it into dictionaries if they become part of the popular vernacular. According to Lisa Nachtigall, associate director of sales and marketing for Oxford University Press, the word will be considered for inclusion by the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary if it appears in newspapers, magazines, books, and other written works over an extended period of time. "Cybliography is a terrific word, so I hope they can get it into common usage," Nachtigall says. (See www.oed.com/about/writing/choosing.html for details about how Oxford chooses words for inclusion.)
Only time will tell. But whatever the outcome, the cybliography project has been a learning experience for Murrell's students—one that has encouraged them to think outside the box. "The best part of this has been kids getting excited about something going on at school," Murrell says. "I just ran with it."
