Page numbers

[Deborah A. Cottreau]

In response to Reid's astute comments I would just like to add that the
transmission of scholarly journals via the net is a new enterprise for
most of us who are trying to get our journals online.  There are so many
considerations, so many bases to cover, and so many decisions to make that
sometimes REMEBERING to put in something as simple as pages numbers
(something not relevant to the electronic medium to begin with) is a
challenge.

A good point well made.

Deborah Cottreau, Co-Editor
_Theatre Research in Canada/Recherches theatrales au Canada_

On Wed, 25 Nov 1998, Reid Gilbert wrote:

> Although I second Ric's concern that a student seeking page numbers for an
> article might be padding a bibliography, I also want to raise one other
> possibility which those of us who teach need to consider.
>
> More and more students are finding articles in online databases and
> downloading these as full-text. I'm thinking of data bases like CBCA
> (Canadian Business and Current Affairs which has absorbed indeces like CPI,
> Canadian Periodical Index)and the quite marvelous new FullText Elite of
> EbscoHost which indexes some 3200 periodicals, including scholarly journals,
> and presents some 70% of these in full-text.  __CTR__ is indexed in
> EbscoHost.   These are, of course, a wonderful resource, but a major problem
> is that the downloaded full text does not indicate the original page numbers.
>  Students only learn the number of pages and the page on which the article
> began in the particular Vol/Issue of the journal/magazine.
>
> This means that students can't make proper internal citations (MLA) or
> footnotes.  It also means that citations in a List of Works Cited or
> Bibliography  must be awkward online citations.  MLA and APA are both in
> process of creating new entry models for such online sources but they are, at
> the moment, rather awkward and incomplete.
>
> I don't understand why those who input the articles can't indicate page
> numbers, but at present they do not.
>
> As the www and electronic journals become more and more the resource of
> choice of students doing undergraduate research, problems with these sources
> will begin to affect all of us who teach.  I encourage my students to use
> online sources for scholarly journals (and I include __CTR__) but I
> discourage them from using general web sites which do not have some
> accreditation. An online journal is simply a reproduction of an article which
> has already undergone jury or editorial scrutiny, but a miscellaneous web
> site can often give poor or downright incorrect information.  I've had some
> funny "quotations" from such unofficial web sites, but I'm also worried about
> the possibility of racist or sexist, or otherwise biased web sites being
> incorporated into essays by naive students who believe anything in print or
> online must be of value and of equal value to all other sources.  I think it
> is even more important than it used to be to teach students to evaluate
> sources, and especially those found on
> the internet.
>
> Just some "teacherly" thoughts.
>
>
> - Reid
>