Administrivia: Sourcing notes

Some evolving thoughts here on noting the sources of quotation (as part of their citations).
In my old Access database, I had a column for in the quotes table for “source,” where I would put where I’d found something — not necessarily the origin of the quote, but where I’d gotten it (in case someone said, “Hey, where did that come from?”). Often it was a hyperlink — sometimes to the article in question (e.g., a quote from someone in Time magazine), or to a Bartleby entry, or to a primary source.
(If someone is only quoted in a second party’s work, I’ve often shied away from using that work as the citation, both because of the space involved and because it’s a secondary source. I have not been consistent about this, however.)
I also used the field for notes about the quotation — “Not found in the works of Fred Smith,” or “Also attributed to Joe Bloggs,” or “Sometimes given as ‘alternative translation.'”
I hadn’t displayed that material in my previous WIST collection, but I made a conscious decision this time out to do so. It’s the follow-up sans serif text that appears underneath some quote. In some cases it’s an URL, in other cases it’s notes on the source.
One thing I’ve discovered, though, is that I can now easily make actual hyperlinks out of this material. Rather than just giving the URL to the Bartleby page, I can say “Source” and make that a hyperlink to that URL. That may clean up the look of things, and allow for some more even useful ways of putting stuff in here. I’d do something similar in the actual citation (e.g., link to the essay or book or whatever), but the “Title” field in MT isn’t as suited to that (just as the Category Description isn’t well suited to putting in a hyperlink for the Wiki page for an author).
I don’t plan on en masse going back and cleaning these things up, but I will do a bit of cleaning as I go along in adding new and updating old material.



 
Added on 16-Aug-07; last updated 16-Aug-07
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