While I plug away on my homework, I have a few other thoughts on citation. One, who decided the APA was the way to go in the library world? I admit, I am woefully unaware of the exact difference between the different styles, but as an undergrad I almost always used MLA and I greatly prefer it. Why are we following a style by the American Psychological Association? as long as you can tell why the resource is from, why do we really care what people use? (ooo, I’m gonna get it for that one.)
Perhaps while we think about the future of cataloging, we should spare a few thoughts for the future of citation as well. None of the current citation models are really keeping up with the variety of resources out there anymore. Honestly, are 400+ pages REALLY necessary to tell you how to cite a source? What’s especially frustrating is that there’s a good possibility you’ll have to reformat your citation structure should you ever publish.
I wish I could say that software is fixing this for us, but my experiences with refworks and Zotero lead me to believe et that you’ll always have to tweak your output a little to meet the exacting (anal) standards of APA. (although, at least, with Zotero the code is open source, so you can modify it to fit your needs. Plus there’s a community of developers behind it.)
OK, I’m done complaining (again) back to the homework.