Internet Referencing Protocol
&
Other Things of Interest.
Pages and Notes
Individual pages should be referenced in the following manner:
eg: Page 24 in a document called Test.html in sub-directory DOCS in main directory TABORITES at tabor.com.au Web site by Author J.J. Citizen in 1998 published by TABOR SYDNEY.
Citizen J.J. 1998, http://www.tabor.com.au/TABORITES/DOCS/Test.html page 24; SYDNEY:TABORSYDNEY
Documents and Images
Same as pages and notes but omit page number.
General Sites (Use this when you need to reference an entire site)
eg: Jorge's Research Site.
NAME: Jorge's Research Site.
URL : http://www.theosearch.home.ml.org
AUTHOR: Jorge Rebolledo
COPYRIGHT: Jorge Rebolledo 1998
WEB MASTER OR AUTHOR LINK: [email protected] / or site URL http:www.theosearch.home.ml.org.
Referencing a page in a document that is one long HTML page.
This is a very common occurrence on the web. People generally load documents onto the www and do not want or need to cut them up into separate HTML documents. In general, a long (say 20 page) document, should be cut up into 20 HTML pages. These HTML pages would then have their own addresses and so are easy to reference.
However, this is by no means the case in many documents. In fact, I printed a document once and it used 70 A4 pages!
In these cases, there are 3 options:
How to Reference something acquired from messageboards and forums.
Often forums are full of good information, and here we are concerned with the web-based forums and messageboards. This means that they are not private e-mail forums.
When you find a piece of information that you will use remember to note down the ENTIRE URL displayed on the address bar of your browser (if you do not see an address bar chances are you have removed it. Search the help on your browser to put the address bar back). Note that this URL is exact and so could be VERY LONG! The general method for referencing is; NAME, DATE, MESSAGE BOARD/FORUM, THEME FORUM, URL.
E.g. Jeremy posted a message on the 12th Dec. 1997 in reply to John's message. I quote Jeremy in my essay responding by saying "the Trinity is not an offence to our rational and logical minds"
I would reference this in the text as (JEREMY,12thDec1997, InsideTheWeb Messageboard,Theology, http://www.insidetheweb.com/messageboards/theology/trinity/John's messageboard/reply.html). The full inside the web URL should also be listed in the bibliography under Internet resources, under Messageboards and Forums :
eg. Bibliography
Internet Resources
Message boards and Forums
Insidetheweb@http://www.insidethe web.com/messageboards/
Private e-mail and other forums.
When you need to make reference to a document referenced from a private forum which will not be accessible by the general public, the entire message and its context should be printed out and the above referencing parameters should be observed. The said document should be supplied with the essay.
NOTE Please note that some forums provide archive access to the public and or members. Very often you can request or down load a copy of the archives for educational purposes.
Section 2
A Word on Copyright
Lawyers are still trying to come to a working definition of Internet Copyright. At the moment you can download anything off the WWW without having to pay for copyright. Images, for instance, are copyrighted creations, but the question still remains as to who owns the pictures once they are made public and freely accessible to the entire WWW. At this time you may not copy and distribute files, or images from the WWW unless you have the copyright or the file states you may do so (look at the free images on the taborsydney site for an example). What I have done in some cases is e-mail the author or web master requesting permission to copy their works for educational purposes. All have been extremely helpful and I would doubt if anyone would not allow it.
Please do not use the materials in an unethical manner.
A Word on Privacy
Have you ever received e-mail from a web site you visited once? This is very common and the reason is that as soon as you access a site, the other server has access to your full address.
A Word on Searching
Many documents you will find will only contain text and will not have any links written into them. This is generally due to the fact that these documents are papers that have been archived on a computer that is connected via a server to the Internet (you get this a lot in Universities). In these cases one misses out on a lot of information if one cannot get back to the MAIN DIRECTORY in which the documents are stored. This is to say that in the folder where this one document is stored could be many more! You can go searching for these directories and documents.
The Internet address of a document or URL functions similar to that of a normal document in a computer. Here is an example: In your computer you may have a document called test.doc in the Documents folder inside the PERSONAL FOLDER that is found in the C:DRIVE DIRECTORY. The address for this 'test.doc' would be 'C://PERSONAL FOLDER/DOCUMENTS/TEST.DOC.'
As you can see it is very similar to a WWW URL.
The folders on your computer represent DIRECTORIES.
If you wanted to go to the Documents Directory you would simply click your mouse on the icon. However, if you did not have a mouse or an icon, you would delete the test.doc section of the address and press return. The computer would then locate the Documents Directory and ready it. A simple display command (DIR) would tell the computer to display all files in that directory.
This is almost the same for Internet addresses.
Here is an example: If you find a document called Trinity.html and the URL looks like this: http://www.God.com/theology/trinity/trinity.html then you can conclude that 'trinity.html' is a document that resides inside the folder (or directory) called 'trinity' which resides inside a folder (or directory) called 'theology'
All you need to do to go back to the 'trinity' folder (or directory) is to delete the trinity.html from the address line and press return. The browser will automatically take you to the 'trinity' folder (or directory). You should then be treated to a list of documents and folders (or directories) that reside within the 'trinity' folder (or directory). Follow these steps to go back any number of directories.
If you use this technique you will be able to access documents that have not been 'posted' by the server, or documents that your search engine has not found.
eg. I found a reference to Paul and women in a papal encyclical inside an unpublished Vatican archive. I then used the above method to go back a few directories and found the entire listing of papal encyclicals to Bishops on various issues of importance!
Please note that since some of these directories are not published onto the Internet, their appearance is more like a normal directory on your computer rather than an Internet page. Don't get scared of this, but search out all the possibilities presented.
Search engines
General search engines are great for basic research, however when you want some serious power you need to look at a much more powerful tool. I use and prefer Web ferret from Ferret soft (www.ferretsoft.com). This engines uses 20 different search engines to find what you want. I have found that it is able to find documents of relevance under may directories and in conjunction with the above search method, it has provided an unending source of documents and links.
Web ferret Standard is free to download, web ferret professional is around $25 US AND HAS SOME GREAT FEATURES THAT THE STANDARD VERSION LACKS.
The links supplied on Jorge's Site and Tabor Sydney's site are much better appreciated if you use all the search methods available to you.
ENJOY!!
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