Re: Http loc not a citation

[geojbb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Bret Bennington)]

Tom Devrie@AOL.COM writes,

>An http address should not be included as part of a formal citation.

>E-journals should be found many places, as paper journals are. It is not up
>to the author to tell the reader where copies can be found.  Rather, it is
>the responsibility of the knowledgeable and ingenious reader to discover the
>location where the journal resides.

One could say the same thing for page numbers in a citation.  The
knowledgeable and ingenious reader should be able to look up the page
numbers of an article once the journal volume has been found.  Yet we
include page numbers to make it EASY to find the article.  Why make me hunt
down the article using a search engine when I could simply ask my computer
to access a cited internet file?  This is not an obsession with a new
technology so much as it is an acknowledgment that a new technology brings
with it new rules and better ways to get things done.

J Bret Bennington
Department of Geology
114 Hofstra University
Hempstead, NY 11550-1090
516-463-5568
FAX: 516-463-6010
E-mail: geojbb@vaxc.hofstra.edu