How should you cite a book viewed in EEBO?

Earlier today, there was a discussion on Twitter on citing Early Modern English books seen on EEBO. But 140 characters is not enough to get my view across, so here ’tis instead.

The question: how should you cite a book viewed on EEBO in your bibliography?

When it comes to digitized sources, many if not most of us probably instinctively cite the original source, rather than the digitized version. This makes sense – the digital version is a surrogate of the original work that we are really consulting. However, digitizing requires a lot of effort and investment, so when you view a book on EEBO but only cite the original work, you are not giving credit where it is due. After all, consider how easy it now is to access thousands of books held in distant repositories, simply by navigating to a website (although only if your institution has paid for access). This kind of facilitation of research should not be taken for granted.

(What’s more, digital scholarship is not yet getting the credit it deserves – and as a creator of digital resources myself, I feel quite strongly that this needs to change.)

Anyway; so how should you cite a work you’ve read in EEBO, then?

This is what the EEBO FAQ says (edited slightly; bold emphasis mine):

When citing material from EEBO, it is helpful to give the publication details of the original print source as well as those of the electronic version. You can view the original publication details of works in EEBO by clicking on the Full Record icon that appears on the Search Results, Document Image and Full Text page views, as well as on the list of Author’s Works.

Joseph Gibaldi’s MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed. (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2009), deals with citations of online sources in section 5.6, pp.181-93. For works on the web with print publication data, the MLA Handbook suggests that details of the print publication should be followed by (i) the title of the database or web site, (ii) the medium of publication consulted (i.e. ‘Web’), and (iii) the date of access (see 5.6.2.c, pp. 187-8).

… When including URLs in EEBO citations, use the blue Durable URL button that appears on each Document Image and Full Record display to generate a persistent URL for the particular page or record that you are referencing. It is not advisable to copy and paste URLs from the address bar of your browser as these will not be persistent.

Here is an example based on these guidelines:

  • Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Qveene: Disposed into Twelue Books, Fashioning XII Morall Vertues. London, 1590. Early English Books Online. Web. 13 May 2003. <http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.helsinki.fi/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_val_fmt=&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:29269:1>.

If you are citing one of the keyed texts produced by the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), the following format is recommended:

  • Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Qveene: Disposed into Twelue Books, Fashioning XII Morall Vertues. London, 1590. Text Creation Partnership digital edition. Early English Books Online. Web. 13 October 2010. <http://gateway.proquest.com.libproxy.helsinki.fi/openurl?ctx_ver=Z39.88-2003&res_id=xri:eebo&rft_val_fmt=&rft_id=xri:eebo:image:29269:1>.

Here’s why I think this is a ridiculous way to cite a book viewed on EEBO:

  1. Outrageous URL. Bibliographies should be readable by humans: the above URL is illegible. Further, while the URL may indeed be persistent, no-one outside the University of Helsinki network can check the validity of this particular URL. And to quote Peter Shillingsburg on giving web addresses in your references, “All these sites are more reliably found by a web search engine than by URLs mouldering in a footnote”. If you’d want to find this resource, you’d use a web search engine and look for “Spenser Faerie Queen EEBO”. Or go directly to EEBO and search there – in any case, you wouldn’t ever use this URL.
  2. Redundant information. Both “Early English Books Online” and “Web”? Don’t be silly.
  3. Access date. If the digital resource you are accessing is stable, there’s no need for this. If it’s a newspaper or a blog, dating is necessary (especially if the contents of the target are likely to change). In the case of resources such as the Oxford English Dictionary – which, though largely stable, undergoes constant updates – each article (headword entry) is marked with which edition of the dictionary it belongs to, which information is enough (and which explains notations like OED2 and OED3, for 2nd and 3rd ed. entries, respectively).

Instead, I suggest and recommend a citation format something like the following:

  • Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Qveene: Disposed into Twelue Books, Fashioning XII Morall Vertues. London, 1590. EEBO. Huntington Library.

With a separate entry in your bibliography for EEBO:

  • EEBO = Early English Books Online. Chadwyck-Healey. <http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home>.

And if you’ve used the TCP version, add “-TCP” to the book reference, and include a separate entry for the Text Creation Partnership (EEBO-TCP).

This makes for much shorter entries in your bibliography, and clears away pages of redundant clutter which doesn’t tell the reader anything.

Why cite the source library?

Book historians will tell you – at some length – that there is no such thing as an edition of a hand-printed book. No two books printed by hand are exactly identical (in the way that modern printed books are identical) – due to misprints and the like, but also because for instance the paper they are printed on will be different from one codex to another (since a printer’s paper stock came from many different paper mills). So two copies of an Early Modern book (the same work, the same ‘edition’) will always differ from each other – sometimes in significant ways.

For this reason, really we should cite books-as-artefacts rather than books-as-works. Happily, EEBO gives the source library of each book, and including that information is straightforward and simple enough.

Problems and questions – can you not cite EEBO?

Some of the books on EEBO are available as images digitized from different microfilm surrogates of the source book. That is, there is more than one microfilm of the same book. Technically, these surrogate images are different artefacts and we should really reference the microfilm too…  I see that this could be a problem, but have not come across an issue where citing the microfilm would have been relevant to the work I was doing.

Q: Which brings us to another important point: if you are only interested in the work, is it really necessary to cite the format, never mind the artefact?

A: Well, yes, for the reasons outlined above – and simply because it is good scholarly practice.

Q: What if you only use EEBO to double-check a page reference or the correct quotation of something you’d made a note of when you viewed (a different copy of) the work in a library?

A: Ah. Well, if you are feeling conscientious, maybe make a note that you’ve viewed the work in EEBO as well as a physical copy – say, use parentheses: “(EEBO. Huntington Library.)”.

Incidentally, since Early Modern books-as-artefacts differ from each other, technically we should always state in the bibliography which copy of the work we have seen. But I’m not sure anyone is quite that diligent – book historians perhaps excepted – and I can’t be bothered to check right now.

Q: Argh. Look, can’t we just go back to not quoting the work and not bother with all this?

A: No. Sorry.

However, I think we’ve drifted a bit far from our departure point.

All this serves to illustrate how citing Early Modern books – be it as physical copies, printed editions or facsimiles, or digital surrogates – is no simple matter. (And we haven’t discussed whether good practice should also include giving the ESTC number in order to identify the work…)  So no wonder no standard practice has emerged on how to cite a work seen on EEBO.

Yet in sum, if you consult books on EEBO, I strongly urge you to give credit to EEBO in your bibliography. 

 

ETA 27.2.2014 8am:

Another argument for why to make sure to cite EEBO is the rather huge matter of what, exactly, is EEBO, and how what it is affects scholarship. In the words of others:

Daniel Powell notes that:

[I]t seems important to realize that EEBO is quite prone to error, loss, and confusion–especially since it’s based on microfilm photographed in the 1930s-40s based on lists compiled in some cases the 1880s.

And Jacqueline Wernimont adds:

EEBO isn’t a catalogue of early modern books – it’s a catalogue of copies. More precisely, it is a repository of digital images of microfilms of single copies of books, and, if your institution subscribes to the Text Creation Partnership (TCP) phases one and/or two, text files that are outsourced transcriptions of microfilm images of single texts.

These points are particularly relevant if you treat EEBO as a library of early modern English works, but they apply equally when you access one or two books to check a reference. As Sarah Werner (among others) has shown us, digital facsimiles of (old) microfilms of early books can miss a lot of details that are clearly visible when viewing the physical books (like coloured ink). While in many cases the scans in EEBO are perfectly serviceable surrogates of the original printed book – black text on white paper tends to capture well in facsimile – the exceptions drive across the point that accessing a book as microfilm images is not the same as looking at a physical copy of the book.

This is not to say that all surrogates, and especially microfilms, are bad as such. In many cases it is the copy that survives whereas the original has been lost. And I have come across cases where the microfilm retains information that has been lost when the manuscripts have been cleaned by conservators and archivists some time after being microfilmed. (Pro tip for meticulous scholars: have a look at all the surrogates, even if you don’t need to!) Also, modern digital imaging is enabling us to read palimpsests and other messy texts with greater ease than before (or indeed at all).

In essence, then, you should make sure to cite EEBO when you use it – not only because of things you may miss due to problems with the images in EEBO, but also because digital resources enable us to do things which are simply impossible or would take forever when using physical copies.

 


Ok this was a long rant. But I hope this might be of use to someone!
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