form for listing URLs in bibliography

[Peter Graham, RUL]

>At 5:20 AM 11/13/95, Ray Stell wrote:
>>will some scholarly type please tell my kid how to correctly list
>>a URL in a bibliography?  Any English majors out there?
>
>This is a good question for the Web4Lib list.  I'll copy it there and
>summarize any responses.
>
>Nick
>
>
>

From:  Peter Graham, Rutgers University Libraries

The IETF convention for citing a URL appears to be to put it in angle
brackets, both for visibility and as an aid to software that might use your
electronic text which has the citation (see last citation below).

The book "Electronic Style" (1993) by Nancy Crane and Xia Li, was out of date
in this respect on publication (there might be some interest in my review of
the work at <URL:http://aultnis.rutgers.edu/texts/irestyle.html>.
There have been no further formal publications on the topic that I
know of.

Sample citations of mine follow, which may be of use; note that the "scheme"
portion doesn't have to be http, by any means, so that the URL form begins to
offer a generalized citation structure as well as a network finding
structure.
***********************************************************************
Examples:

13] Tim Berners-Lee. July 14, 1993. Uniform Resource Locators
[online, as
<ftp://ds.internic.net/internet-drafts/draft-ietf-uri-url-01.txt>
(or ...-01.ps)].  There is a good deal of more recent work in this
area being done by IETF groups (for current status, see
<URL:http://www.ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/1id-abstracts.html>.

...

[17] See, for example, Jerome Saltzer, "Technology, Networks,
and the Library of the Year 2000", in Future Tendencies in
Computer Science, Control, and Applied Mathematics, (Lecture
Notes in Computer Science 653), edited by A. Bensoussan and
J.-P. Verjus, Springer-Verlag, New York, 1992, pages 51-67;
also available at <URL:http://ltt-www.lcs.mit.edu/ltt-www/
Papers/inria.html>. See also the works mentioned of Berners-Lee
and the IETF groups working on the URI (the group working on
the Uniform Resource Characteristics (URC), however, would
benefit from more exposure to cataloging principles; see <URL:
ftp://ietf.cnri.reston.va.us/
internet-drafts/draft-ietf-uri-urc-req-01.txt>). 

[As an added wrinkle to the citation problem, note that going to that
last URL will now get you a message telling you that the file no longer
exists; as an expired internet-draft, it has been deleted and is not
available.]
***********************************************************************

The following is taken from RFC 1738, available at
<URL:http://ds.internic.net/rfc/rfc1738.txt>:

APPENDIX: Recommendations for URLs in Context

   URIs, including URLs, are intended to be transmitted through
   protocols which provide a context for their interpretation.

   In some cases, it will be necessary to distinguish URLs from other
   possible data structures in a syntactic structure. In this case, is
   recommended that URLs be preceeded with a prefix consisting of the
   characters "URL:". For example, this prefix may be used to
   distinguish URLs from other kinds of URIs.

   In addition, there are many occasions when URLs are included in
other
   kinds of text; examples include electronic mail, USENET news
   messages, or printed on paper. In such cases, it is convenient to
   have a separate syntactic wrapper that delimits the URL and
separates
   it from the rest of the text, and in particular from punctuation
   marks that might be mistaken for part of the URL. For this purpose,
   is recommended that angle brackets ("<" and ">"), along with the
   prefix "URL:", be used to delimit the boundaries of the URL.  This
   wrapper does not form part of the URL and should not be used in
   contexts in which delimiters are already specified.

   In the case where a fragment/anchor identifier is associated with a
   URL (following a "#"), the identifier would be placed within the
   brackets as well.

   In some cases, extra whitespace (spaces, linebreaks, tabs, etc.)
may
   need to be added to break long URLs across lines.  The whitespace
   should be ignored when extracting the URL.

   No whitespace should be introduced after a hyphen ("-") character.
   Because some typesetters and printers may (erroneously) introduce a
   hyphen at the end of line when breaking a line, the interpreter of
a
   URL containing a line break immediately after a hyphen should
ignore
   all unencoded whitespace around the line break, and should be aware
   that the hyphen may or may not actually be part of the URL.

   Examples:

      Yes, Jim, I found it under <URL:ftp://info.cern.ch/pub/www/doc;
      type=d> but you can probably pick it up from <URL:ftp://ds.in
      ternic.net/rfc>.  Note the warning in <URL:http://ds.internic.
      net/instructions/overview.html#WARNING>.
***********************************************************************

Peter Graham    psgraham at gandalf.rutgers.edu    Rutgers University Libraries
169 College Ave., New Brunswick, NJ 08903   (908)445-5908; fax (908)445-5888
              <URL:http://aultnis.rutgers.edu/pghome.html>