Cite your sources

When I was a kid, besides having to walk five miles through the snow every day to school, the worst thing we ever had to do was write a report and "Cite your sources, you have to cite your sources" in a bibliography.

PS 144 in Queens NY
We actually lived only about a block-and-a-half from school



You had to trudge off to the library and find about five or six books on George Herbert Mead and the roots of Social Pragmatism. First you would have to look up what any of that even meant in the Encyclopedia Britannica.

You'd have to pull the 'M' volume and the 'S' volume and probably the 'P' and check the Sociology entry and then wait to make copies on the only working xerox where you would always get an extra dark copy for a nickel that you couldn't read and probably wouldn't use anyway but you could cite it if you remembered to write the stupid page number down.

You got smart in a hurry, xeroxing that encyclopedia, and the first thing you learned was that the 'S's didn't start at page 1, they started on maybe page 1372. The kind of mistake you cannot afford when you are citing your sources.


G.H. Meade
Honestly I never even heard of him until I posted this but he looks like a pretty cool cat




Worse yet was going to the Encyclopedia shelves and the volumes you needed were missing and you had to use some second-rate source like Compton's or Collier's or Britannica's vastly inferior American cousin the Encyclopedia Americana. Otherwise you would go around and check the desks, maybe some other stupid kid had left it on one of the desks.

You couldn't beat those old machines in output and efficiency

Copies really did cost a nickel that part is true




When you had assembled your books after several detours through the Dewey Decimal System, you would start skimming the two stacks of books on the library desk that were piled higher than your head when you sat down.

For the first time in your tender book reporting life, you were now at kind of a crossroads. Since you had to cite your sources, did that mean that the teacher was actually going to go to the library and check your references? Had they read these same books, or have them back at school or at home? Was there some special Teacher's Edition where they could check your bibliography for accuracy?

Did this mean that you would actually have to write the report?

NY Times reporters excepted, plagiarism in this country is most prevalent amongst school children age 8-12 with a book report due within the next three days.

The first evidence of the Dewey Decimal System was unearthed in Bulgaria and appears to be more than 7000 years old

The original system included maps to each bookshelf, making it easier to locate SOCIOLOGY 971.324 through 973.126



But then, sitting behind your mountain of books and halfway through trying to change the author's words in Miller, David L. (1973) G.H. Mead: Self, Language and the World. University of Chicago Press pp. 62-73, enlightenment came suddenly.

If you were citing your sources anyway, maybe copying directly from the book was a good thing. Maybe it was allowed. Or maybe, just maybe, it was even encouraged?

Bibliography comes from the Latin meaning "you can copy it as long as you cite it". The biblio part actually refers to the first library I believe, the famous one in I think Alexandria where Socrates first cited Plato.

Canfora, Luciano (trans. Martin Ryle) (1989). The Vanished Library. A Wonder of the Ancient World. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN.


The modern day book shown alongside its primitive ancestors

Easy to carry home from school in the snow but probably very hard to find if you drop it.


Kids have it so much easier today. Sure copies cost 49 cents a page for black or 89 cents for color but the paper stock at Kinko's is generally much better than library mimeograph paper. No kid I know actually reads books anymore either. I guess you just make sure all your links are working and hand in your Kindle?


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