A PROPOSAL FOR REFERENCING INTERNET RESOURCES

Anita Greenhill & Gordon Fletcher, Faculty of Humanities, Griffith University

Introduction

Despite the rapid growth of the Internet during 1994 and 1995 no adequate or consistent method of referencing material from this source has been developed. Failure to address this issue will result in Internet resources not being awarded full recognition within academic discourse. Unless corrected, the significance of this oversight will be exacerbated as more academic journals become available on-line and more computer literate students enter tertiary study. Furthermore, the status of researchers who have published in this medium will be affected and universities may deprive themselves of the staff best equipped to meet the challenges of the information economy.
To overcome this problem, this paper proposes the adoption of an Internet referencing style that follows, as closely as possible, existing referencing styles. The foundations for the proposed guidelines are the Australian Government Publishing Service's Style Manual (1994) and the available information provided by Internet-based file formats such as the Hyper-Text Markup Language (HTML). This combination of resources avoids the need for the inclusion of the [computer file] label in bibliographic entries which has become a de facto and inadequate solution to a complex problem furthermore the simplicity of the AGPS style allows these proposed methods to be readily adopted to the alternate referencing in use, such as Harvard and M.L.A.

The World Wide Web and HTML

The conventions established by the World Wide Web (WWW) to access a variety of file formats provide the key to the development of a concise system for Internet-based resources in referenced works. This system is based upon the Uniform Resource Locator (URL). In graphical WWW browsers activating the option, Show Locations, reveals the URL of the document currently being accessed. The generic format of a URL is -
fileformat://computer_name.type_of_system.country_code/file_directory(s)/file_name

Thus,

http://www.gu.edu.au/gwis/hub/hub.home.html

refers to

This information provides the basis for referencing WWW documents.

Referencing WWW Pages

WWW pages can be reference in a manner similar to that of conventional monographs. The author, title and date of the page can be extracted and used conventionally. The publisher information is replaced by the institution or group who maintain the computer upon which the WWW pages reside. This is usually indicated in the computer name section of the URL. The place of publication is replaced by the URL of the WWW page. In some cases, WWW pages are associated with an electronic journal. These pages can only be referenced as journals if more complete volume and number, or date, information is available. It is also worth considering the manner in which these documents could be accessed. Unlike conventional journals, it is possible, even likely, that articles will be accessed directly without reference to the journal. Each individual web page could be considered as a single stand alone document without any reference to an overarching journal affiliation.

As an example -

Brenner, Anita 1995, The Murder Trial: Genre or Event-Scene?, C-Theory,
http://english-server.hss.cmu.edu/ctheory/e-murder_trial.html

Acknowledging these additional details, however, may assist readers to assess the veracity of the material, an equally important consideration when utilising Internet material for research purposes. Irrespective of these quality issues, however, the significant information - the author, title and URL - is usually the data which is readily discernible on an individual WWW page.
In the example given, it is worth noting that this document is part of the electronic journal C-Theory but other than this information no additionally useful reference details, such as volume or date, are available.The example raises two general style. The conventional full stop at the end of the reference has been omitted to avoid URL confusion. Minimalist punctuation should be the rule of thumb when presenting URLs as exact details are necessary to allow them to be revisited by other researchers. Similarly the URL should not be broken across two lines. However, if this wastes paper or looks unsightly, the internal breaks of the URL should occur directly before or after a slash to minimise possible reading errors.

An example of an ejournal reference -

Foucault, Michel 1995, "Madness, the Absence of Work", excerpts, tr. P.Stasny & D.
Stengel, Critical Inquiry, vol.21, no.2, Winter, http://www.uchicago.edu:80/
u.scholarly/CritInq/v21n2.foucault.html

Fortunately, gopher resources, being an older textual predecessor of the WWW, can be referenced in the same manner. The major distinction is the inclusion of gopher:// at the beginning of the URL and unusual file and directory names. Web and gopher formats represent a majority of the Internet material available for inclusion in academic works.

File Transfer Protocol (FTP)

File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is generally used to download software or text from a remote site to the user. If the user is accessing FTP through a WWW browser the text is displayed "raw". This type of file can normally be attributed to individual people with all the usual referencing details. FTP is the earliest type of Internet publishing and, when it was (and occasionally still is) used, the material is often a digitised version of the conventionally published material. If the material cannot be accessed in the paper edition the URL is recognisable -

ftp://ftp.uiuc.edu/pub/reference/grammar.txt

Users who choose to access FTP material through other methods can easily calculate the URL by prepending ftp:// to the machine name and appending the directories and sub-directories of the file's location.

An FTP document is referenced as -

Gaffin, Adam 1994, EFF's Guide to the Internet v2.3, Electronic Frontier
Foundation, ftp://nysernet.org/pub/resources/guides/bigdummy.txt

In FTP material the date of publication will sometimes be unavailable for particular documents. As an intermediate solution a tag prepended to the year of access could serve to indicate the inaccurate dating of the material. A possible tag would be the tilde (~)as it is generally available on all computer keyboards and is easily and unambiguously written (compare the common errors that are made in handwriting & and @).

An example of this indefiniteness is contained in this minimal reference from a gopher server -

Klossowski ~1995, Polytheism, The Spoon Collective,
gopher://jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU:70/00/pubs/listservs/spoons
/deleuze-guattari.archive/papers/kloss.polytheism

A preferable solution to this problem would be to encourage the inclusion of bibliographic data within Internet-based documents. This allows the referencing information to remain regardless of whether the researcher stores their material as printed pages or electronically.

Usenet News

The distributed nature of the Usenet news prevents the URL from being used within bibliographic entries as it produces totally meaningless URLs for later reference or retrieval.
Usenet news lends itself towards a more periodical-orientated style of referencing. There is usually some form of authorship and a header which approximates a title, the newsgroup itself assumes the role of the journal and dates replace specific volume/number details.

This results in a meaningful Usenet reference -

Healy, Matthew 1995, "Re: More metadiscussion (Was: Re: read(THIS) || die)",
comp.infosystems.authoring.cgi, 13th Nov.

The major problem with references to the Usenet is the temporary nature of the postings. Accessing this material at a later date may be more easily undertaken by contacting the author (via email?) of the article, assuming that they themselves still have copies of the material or querying one of the large Usenet databases.

Listservers

The listserver posts to each subscriber's email address a copy of an electronic journal (or discussion) each time a new issue (or comment) becomes available. The periodic nature of this material allows researchers to use conventions similar to those for WWW electronic journals. The major difference is the replacement of the URL with the subscription email address of the listserver.

For example -

Postmodern Culture 1995, "Call for Peer Reviewers", 20th July, pmc-listserv.ncsu.edu

Email

Email is the personal communication of the Internet. Referencing to email should be undertaken with the same judiciousness that is used with all personal communication. Personal communication is not acknowledged in the bibliography of research. In-line references simply acknowledge the interlocutor and the date with an annotation. If the person's name is unclear, the section of the email address in front of the @ symbol could be used. As an example E.Bloodaxe@hum.gu.edu.au becomes -

(E.Bloodaxe 1995, email, 24th July)

However, some institutions and commercial service providers prefer to use a numeric system for allocating personal email addresses. A minimal email communication conducted with someone connected through one of these sites verges upon a type of referencing incomprehensibility -

(s326134 1995, email, 24th July)

Irrespective of this, full email addresses should not be employed in referencing as this information is akin to the inclusion of an informant's full street address with all the weight of the ethical considerations that this embodies.

Page Numbering

The inability for electronic publications to adequately mirror the pagination structure of conventional paper documents is often cited as a major stumbling point for the incorporation of references to ejournals in academic work. To leave the resources of the Internet untouched on the basis of such a trivial rationale would be unfortunate and short sighted in the face of such a powerful and new medium for the wide dissemination of information.
There are a variety of methods for providing an indication to the source of specific material within the wider body of work. None of these are fully satisfactory, perhaps, reflecting the inappropriate application of conventional publishing practices to a medium which is not fully analogous.
The method which most accurately reflects conventionally publishing is to manually number printed pages of the document. This could be represented within text references as the page number surrounded by square brackets to indicate the imprecise nature of this information. The fourth page of a printout from Adam Gaffin's EFF's Guide to the Internet v2.3, for example, is represented as -

(Gaffin 1994, p[4])

Another possibility would be to number each paragraph of the document and using that in-text reference refers to a paragraph instead of the conventional page. This would, however, appear to involve a lot of counting.
A point worth considering is the nature of the file structure that has developed with the increased use of WWW documents. Most designers of WWW pages now prefer to incorporate information into many small documents rather than bringing the information together as a single document. The primary reason for this particular stylistic method is to provide fast loading for individual documents. With this, increasingly predominant, WWW style the URL can simultaneously represent an electronic page and a monograph (as a result of the hypertext links that are provided within the referenced document). It is not without coincidence that individual WWW documents are referred to as "pages."2

A Conclusion and a Note about Authority

The methods we have outlined here have a heavy reliance upon the phenomena of the World Wide Web and its specific manner of accessing Internet resources. This provides backward compatibility with earlier resources as well as a standard on which to build future developments. Bringing Internet resources, in a referencing sense, into a form of consistency with printed works may contribute in some small way to developing the recognition of electronic publishing as a legitimate medium for academic publications.
The issue of the Internet as a legitimate medium for academic discourse appears to largely be based upon the other material that is concurrently available - personal diatribes and rants, commercial "shopfronts," obscure humour and pornographic images. In this situation the analogy with conventional publishing holds firm. The quality of academic journals is not judged by the covers of other items in a bookstore and the same discretion should be exercised with electronic publications. The arguments against electronic journals often imply that researchers will not or cannot employ the same judgement towards them as they employ in a conventional library. This is an erroneous and damaging suggestion.
Electronic publishing will not, however, replace conventional printing. Just as the television did not supersede the radio and radio failed to do anything other than complement print media, widely distributed electronic networks will occupy distinct corridors of social space. These spaces should not be forsaken simply because they are "raw" or "new" and without any definite or pre-existent conventions. The real advantage of electronic networks is the manner in which they extend our contemporary concepts of communication. These advantages should be embraced by the Australian academic community as a whole.

Humanities HUB home page
 Humanities HUB Overview and Introduction
(A longer discussion concerning the referencing of Internet resources will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Australian Library Journal)

1 The filename is case sensitive thus HUB.HOME.HTML does not point to the same file as above. Researchers providing a URL for Internet-based material should be aware of this when referencing files. Back

2 The release of Netscape 2 has brought some relief to this issue of page numbering. Currently printouts from Netscape 2 automatically have the page number, URL of the page, the title of the page and the time and date that the page was printed inserted into the extreme four corners of the page.Hopefully, this will be adopted by all the software companies producing Web browsers.Back

Digitised - February 1996