Re: Http loc not a citation

From
Date
>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

No, Tom is right with regard to the inadequacy of URLs (http addresses):
they tell us just were a document is - or was. What we need in order to
find a document is not a Universal Resource Location (URL), but something
like a Universal Resource Name (URN), which is currently being developed.
See

http://www.ncsa.uiuc.edu/InformationServers/Horizon/URN/urn.html

This would be equivalent to giving the journal title (and its location as
well); whereas URL, as Tom correctly points out, only corresponds to a
library shelf code, which may or may not be helpful.

One of the most aggravating aspects of the current Web is the frequency of
non-functional URLs. I look forward to the time when this is history.

Stefan Bengtson                      _/        _/ _/_/_/    _/        _/
Department of Palaeozoology         _/_/      _/ _/    _/  _/_/    _/_/
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