Internet Referencing

Everything you find on the internet is essentially a document, and everything you want to reference will, in the end, turn out to be some sort of document, artefact, object. To reference an Internet site effectively and accurately, you need to keep asking "what is it exactly that I'm looking at?". Is the web page 'the document itself' or is the web page the 'online version' of another document?

Let's look again at the Fisher-Stitt article:

Title (3) Using Class Notes to Document Advances in Late-Nineteenth-Century Ballet Technique
Author (1) Norma Sue Fisher-Stitt (York, Ontario)

Host document title (4)(French) Documentation et Art de l'Acteur
Host document title (4)(English) Records and Images of the Art of the Performer
Host document subtitle (4)(French) 18ème Congrès International, Stockholm 3-7 septembre1990
Host document subtitle (4) (English) 18th International Congress, Stockholm 3-7 September 1990
Editor of Host document Editor (4a) : Barbro Stribolt (Drottningholms Teatermuseum). City of Publication (6) Stockholm: Date of Publication (7) 1992, p. 43-48
Date of last revision/update (8) Last modified: November 21, 2000

When we sort out all this information and identify the elements of the reference, some things become easier.

• There's no doubt as to the title (3) or author(1). We even have an editor. (4a)
• We can probably leave out the French title
• There is a city of publication (6) , a date (7), and some page numbers - that means that we're probably looking at the online version of a published work

What's not so easy is the year (2). We have to decide whether to give 1990, 1992 or 2000 - do you give the date that Fisher-Stitt delivered her lecture, or the date on which Stribolt published it, or the date on which the SIBMAS website was updated? 1990 is the date of a conference, not a document, and so can arguably be ignored (but not completely). So 2000 or 1992? The document we have seen is dated 2000, but the document contained within it to is 1992. Let's suppose that you were at the conference in 1990. Then you read the conference papers in 1992 - you notice that some things you heard had been left out. Now you read the article on the web. Even more things have been left out. There is clearly a difference between Fisher-Stitt (1990) [your tape recording of the lecture], Fisher-Stitt (1992) [Stribolt's edited transcript], and Fisher-Stitt (2000) [SIBMAS's online version of the 1992 transcript of a paper in 1990].

Now it is perhaps more obvious why the reference should read:

Note: We have a choice of whether to put the [online] after the title of the article, or after the title of the host publication (Records and images etc.). You could argue the case for either, but since the Stribolt (1992) mentions page numbers, it is probably true to say that the Stribolt is not exactly online, but that sections of it, including Fisher-Stitt, are. That being the case, I have putthe [online] after the first article.

It's detailed and complex. But it does everything we want a reference to do, and most of all, it solves a common problem of internet referencing - citing within the text. Now we have organised the reference, we can cite this as Fisher-Stitt (2000) in the text.

So much for complex references. What do you do if you have Too Little Information?