Amazon.com Review
You're preparing the bibliography of your research project, and some of your information came from documents you found on the Internet. How do you cite the Web sites? Scholarly citations of hard-copy texts such as books, magazines, and journals follow long-established rules, but electronic sources don't often fit neatly into standard patterns. Clearly, new guidelines need to be set to keep up with the evolution of the Internet. The
Columbia Guide steps into the breach with admirable attention to detail as well as discussions of purpose and intent to clarify and support its online style solutions. After revisiting the principles of access, intellectual property, economy, standardization, and clarity that underlie the rules of citing sources, Walker and Taylor delve into the nitty-gritty of URLs and login names, signature files and publication information, providing both humanities-style and sciences-style examples for each.
With a similarly careful, logical, and scholarly progression, they cover bibliographic formats for the World Wide Web, e-mail, discussion lists, and newsgroups, plus document style (and its logic) when formatting for print publications, diskettes, and computer networks. When you work in this virual world, which changes so frequently and dynamically, where anything seems possible and conventions be damned, it's especially important to standardize and adhere to some rules, a goal greatly advanced by The Columbia Guide to Online Style. --Stephanie Gold
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Library Journal
In the last five years new editions of the standard manuals of style and citation have appeared (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style, Univ. of Chicago, 1993; Modern Language Association Handbook for Writers, MLA, 1994), which writers, publishers, librarians, and academics hoped would give authoritative answers to the troublesome questions posed by electronic media. But none of these guides adequately addressed the crucial changes brought on by the World Wide Web. In 1994, Walker (English, Univ. of South Florida) developed a simple and effective style sheet for citing online resources and posted it on the web. The style was quickly endorsed by the Alliance for Computers and Writing, and her guidelines have been adopted by numerous online journals. Now Walker and Taylor (English, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) have produced a comprehensive manual that not only covers citation of online documents but provides guidelines for producing them. Part 1 presents an adaptable "citation template" with numerous helpful examples in both a humanities style, based on Modern Language Association form, and a scientific style much like that of the American Psychological Association. Part 2 gives a theoretical rationale for document style and describes standards for producing online documents. While the guidelines in this book are not likely to change dramatically, any changes will be made available free of charge at the publisher's web site,
. With its index and annotated glossary, this guide is an excellent supplement to the standard style manuals.?Paul A. D'Alessandro, Portland P.L., ME
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
