The Columbia Guide to Online Style [Paperback]

Professor Janice R. Walker (Author), Professor Todd Taylor (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0231107897 | ISBN-13: 978-0231107891 | Publication Date: September 15, 1998 | Edition: 1

At last, an authoritative guide for citing and creating electronic sources. While there are several handbooks and manuals that dictate style for traditional print media, until now, no single volume has adequately addressed the complications and transformations caused by the proliferation of online publishing. The Columbia Guide to Online Style makes the methods of online citation and production accessible to a wide audience, addressing the urgent needs of students, scholars, and professionals.

Editorial Reviews

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

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.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Columbia University Press; 1 edition (September 15, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0231107897
• ISBN-13: 978-0231107891
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,220,283 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive, but somewhat redundant., December 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Columbia Guide to Online Style (Paperback)

Citation of materials from the (extremely) volatile web was a major problem. Creating a summary, and providing a hyperlink to the original content, proved a major issue since electronic content moves so frequently.. The Columbia Guide gives some assurance that proper citation can be given. Some of the citation style suggestions seem very redundant, and there is no clear table or quick summary to highlight the proper method for common usage. Still, as the first work of this type, it gives an excellent baseline for referencing, building, managing on-line content.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Wishing it would have more citation styles, September 16, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Columbia Guide to Online Style (Paperback)

The book is pretty good. Its clear and concise--straight to the point. I wish it would contain more of the different styles, but it mainly focuses on two--humanitites style and scientific style (MLA & APA). It would really help students to sort of have all of the styles in one book so we do not have to get like four or five books just because our professor wanted a paper a certain way. This book also focuses on the online citation (most books fall short of the online stuff because it is so new).