Uh-oh

What is the protocol for a web citation that has...vanished? Obviously, I'll check the Internet Archive, but still.  It was a reprint of a 1931 article in an out-of-the-way popular journal that I suspect will be very hard to get my hands on. 

Comments

[tatiana.larina]

Elementary, my dear Watson :-) You give the access date - approximate of course, no one is going to know whether you really accessed this page two days earlier. In this way you indicate "when I checked this website last year it was there".

Thus, if I read today one of your old blog posts, and wanted to quote it later in MLA format, it would be:

Burstein, Miriam. "Robert Elsmere vs...my netbook." The Little Professor. N.p., 06 08 2012 [this is the publication date]. Web. 4 Sep 2012 [this is the access date]. .

[tatiana.larina]

The software ate the rest of my post, but this should be followed by the URL, even it is a defunct one.

[Mmy]

My first response is want to spend the next day or two connecting with all the people I know who are doing scholarly digitizing and cataloging in order to help tracking it down.

Seriously -- if you post the information you have I can ask around and see if anyone could give you a hand on that.

[Miriam]

Thanks, Tatiana.

Mmy: Thanks--I'll dig it up later today.

[Contingent Cassandra]

I was thinking the same as Tatiana; this is why MLA-style citations for web documents include access dates. It's also why I tell my students to save a local copy of anything really useful they find,and why I try to remember to do so, usually by PDF, myself. I then use the date of the PDF file as the access date. Presumably you have a file or notes or something that you were working from, which can provide an access date; beyond that, your readers are just going to have to take your word that you didn't hallucinate it (and/or go searching for it in obscure places themselves).