University Affairs has a story by Tim Johnson on the latest MLA Style Manual, titled “MLA changes course on web citations”, where they quote me about the new MLA recommendation that URLs aren’t needed in citations (because they aren’t reliable.) I had a long discussion with Tim – being interviewed when they have talked to other people is a strange way to learn about a subject. In retrospect it would have been more useful to point out the emerging alternatives to URLs, some of which are designed to be more stable. Some that I know of:
- TinyURL and similar projects let you get a short (“tiny”) URL that redirects to the full location. A list of such tools is at http://daverohrer.com/15-tinyurl-alternatives-shorten-your-urls/
- The Digital Object Identifier (DOI®) System allows unique identifiers to be allocated and then has a resolution system to point to a location(s). To quote from their Overview, a DOI “is a name (not a location) for an entity on digital networks. It provides a system for persistent and actionable identification and interoperable exchange of managed information on digital networks.”
- The WayBack Machine grabs copies of web pages at regular intervals if allowed. You can thus see changes in the document over time.
In short, we don’t have a clear standard that has emerged, but we have alternatives that could provide us with a stable system.
I should add that the point of a citation is not what is in it, but whether it lets you easily find the referenced research so that we can recapitulate the research.