Forums
I understand the reasons for supplying the date you accessed information on a website with the URL in a first reference note; something may have changed since you accessed it, and there is often no relevant "date posted" to use instead. But I'm having a problem with the concept of inserting an access date in a source list entry, which is normally associated with a publication date.
For example, in EE 6.25, under Online Database (p. 277), the first reference note has "(http://www.ancestry.com : accessed 16 January 2009)", and the source list entry ends "http://www.ancestry.com : 2009." This mixes citation detail with bibliographic data, and I think it could be misleading, implying that 2009 might have some relevance to the publication of either the database or the website itself, when it does not (beyond the fact that the website and database both existed at some time during 2009).
Furthermore, I may have dozens of reference notes to the "1850 United States Federal Census" database, accessed over the course of several years; I've been gathering data from Ancestry databases since 2010. Would I cite a range of years (2010-2014) in a source list entry for a database I have repeatedly consulted? Again, that hardly seems relevant in a source list, and could be construed as the range of time over which Ancestry created/published the database or the website. (Websites of course often have a copyright line that includes a date range from the initial year of existence to the current year, not useful for a source list since the end date changes every year.)
Granted, the contents of an online database may change over time (e.g., entries added or corrected), where other sources remain static, but a specific access date is still relevant only for a specific citation. In any case, the same convention is also applied to other online materials, such as the Online Images section in the same EE 6.25. A downloaded census image is not going to change whether I accessed it in 2010 or 2014. The only publication data the source list entry should need to specify is the website and URL. (It's worth noting that when those same images are accessed directly on the NARA microfilm, the source list entry has only "n.d." instead of a publication date.)
I would suggest that the convention for "publication data" in the source list entry for an online source should be one of the following:
Website Title. URL.
or perhaps
Website Title. URL : n.d.
Although a website with multiple databases/collections may be considered analogous to a book with chapters by multiple authors, I don't feel that it is appropriate or useful to list any actual "publication year" for a website, because unlike a book (where all the chapters are published at once and therefore have a single publication date), a website's "publication" is ongoing and "chapters" can be added, changed, or removed at any time.
If a date is provided for an individual database or collection (Ancestry.com, for example, lists a publication date of 2009 in their source information for the 1850 Census), that date might be used in the source list entry, but it seems like it should be attached the database information, not to the website. Perhaps something like this:
"Database Title" (2009). Database. Website Title. URL : n.d.
Kathy McCracken
Kathy,
Kathy,
By longstanding convention, across many citation style systems, "n.d." is used when there is no date by which a source can be placed into a time frame. That would not be the case in the circumstances you are discussing. It is the situation with some microfilm, as in the examples to which you refer.
You also state:
"... unlike a book (where all the chapters are published at once and therefore have a single publication date), a website's "publication" is ongoing and "chapters" can be added, changed, or removed at any time."
This is the reason why we identify the date or time frame during which our cited material was there at that website, as noted in EE 2.37.