You Saw it Where?

Some Tips on Handling Electronic Sources

It is always a good idea to maintain personal copies of electronic information, when possible. It is good practice to print or save Web pages or, better, using a program like Adobe Acrobat, to keep your own copies for future reference. Most Web browsers will include URL/electronic address information when you print, which makes later reference easy. Also learn to use the Bookmark function in your Web browser.

Basic Style for Citations of Electronic Sources
Here are some common features you should try and find before citing electronic sources in MLA style. Always include as much information as is available/applicable:

• Author and/or editor names
• Name of the database, or title of project, book, article
• Any version numbers available
• Date of version, revision, or posting
• Publisher information
• Date you accessed the material
• Electronic address, printed between carets (<, >). *we will be vting that rule*

**Special Warning for Researchers Writing/Publishing Electronically**
MLA style requires electronic addresses to be listed between carets (<, >). This is a dangerous practice for anyone writing or publishing electronically, as carets are also used to set off HTML, XHTML, XML and other markup language tags (e.g., HTML's paragraph tag,). When writing in electronic formats, be sure to properly encode your carets.

Examples:

Basic format:
Name of Site. Date of Posting/Revision. Name of institution/organization affiliated with the site (sometimes found in copyright statements). Date you accessed the site .

Example: The Purdue OWL Family of Sites. 26 Aug. 2005. The Writing Lab and OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. 23 April 2006 http://owl.english.purdue.edu/.

Resources for citations:

MLA style, from Citation Styles Online (MLA) (http://www.bedfordstmartins.com/online/cite5.html#1)

MLA style from Prudue Owl (http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/09/)

Source: Abobe Education.