Web page

Web pages can be tricker to reference properly than they may first appear. The issue is that so much of our information content is accessed through the web (http/https). This leads to a reasonable question like: Isn’t everything a Web page? To which the resounding answer should be “No”. Some things which are accessed through the web are not web pages. In the very early days academic books (e.g., Studying the History of English) and even journal articles ( D-Lib Magazine, First Monday, SIL Electronic Working Papers, etc.) were presented as series of web pages — often without database driven content management systems. These sorts of resources should be referenced as book or journal articles, not Web pages. In a similar manner Wikipedia articles should be referenced as encyclopedia articles, not Web pages. Blog posts and social media posts are also not Web pages even though they constitute a significant portion of the web. Part of the reason for these distinctions lies in the facts that Zotero and manuals of style have distinct item types for these other types of information units.

Zotero Screen for Web Pages

The Need for Referencing Archived Web Pages

There is a growing practice of referencing Web pages. The average length that a Web page remains live and accessible is about 90 days (Citation: Kahle, 1997) Kahle, B. (1997). Preserving the Internet. Scientific American, 276(3). 82–83. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/24993660 . Link rot, the reality that web links break because they point to something which has changed or has been removed, is a significant issue for creating enduring linkages within and across scholarly works (Citation: Dellavalle, 2003) Dellavalle, R. (2003). INFORMATION SCIENCE: Going, Going, Gone: Lost Internet References. Science, 302(5646). 787–788. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1088234 (Citation: Habibzadeh, 2013) Habibzadeh, P. (2013). Decay of References to Web sites in Articles Published in General Medical Journals: Mainstream vs Small Journals. Applied Clinical Informatics, 04(04). 455–464. https://doi.org/10.4338/ACI-2013-07-RA-0055 (Citation: Klein et al., 2014) Klein, M., Van de Sompel, H., Sanderson, R., Shankar, H., Balakireva, L., Zhou, K. & Tobin, R. (2014). Scholarly Context Not Found: One in Five Articles Suffers from Reference Rot. In Bar-Ilan, J. (Eds.), PLoS ONE, 9(12). e115253. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0115253 and even works of law (Citation: Peoples, 2016) Peoples, L. (2016). Is the Internet Rotting Oklahoma Law?. Tulsa Law Review, 52(1). 40. Retrieved from https://digitalcommons.law.utulsa.edu/tlr/vol52/iss1/1 . Additionally, one of the issues related to scholarship and Web page references is the ephemeral nature of the content at a single URL. That is, website managers may choose to change the content of a website without changing the URL. Often references only include URLs. So, someone who is following the URL might not see the same things that the original author saw.

Archives for Web Objects

There are several archives which specialize on web objects for public access. These include:

• The Internet Archive
  • archive-it — a service to libraries by the Internet Archive
• Perma.cc
• UK Web Archive (UKWA)
• Archive.today
• Time Travel
• Various members of the International Internet Preservation Consortium

Additional Elements Added to the Extra Field for Archived Web Pages

Archived Web Pages in Manuals of Style

Archived Web pages are generally not given treatments in published manuals of style. However, I see no reason to not treat them like any other archived resource—using patterns within the style sheet for archived resources.

Bibliography