The Columbia Guide to Online Style

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