Robert Hauptman

An odd book that is a history of documentation and an attempt at creating a kind of philosophy of documentation. It's strength is in the history of documentation and citation, i.e. footnotes, endnotes, bibliographies, and marginalia. It does what other works, like Grafton's The Footnote and Zerby's The Devil's Details do not do, provides actual illustrations, i.e. images of old footnotes and marginalia and such stretching back to the Middle Ages, the birth of printing, the Enlightenment, and to the twentieth century. This is the book's strength. But Hauptman's opinions cloud his judgments. He is an opinionated cuss, and is not afraid to tell you authors or footnotes or citation styles he finds stupid. (Lukacs is an opinionated cuss, but you smile at his curmudgeonliness; Hauptman's opinions just grate.)

Hauptman is decidedly angry and dismissive of the discursive or commentary footnote. This despite the fact he has three double-columned pages of discursive commentary endnotes (pp. 205-207) appended to his text! He bemoans how they meander or take away from the story. He bewails that his beloved MLA moved from footnotes to parenthetical citations, but he so stringently sticks to the MLA form that he deforms the examples he gives of other citation formats. For instance, in discussing the Chicago Manual of Style's bibliographic-note system he adds the MLA citation. For example, from page 150,he gives an example of Chicago style... I will show the last few words:

...New York: McGraw-Hill [Chicago 595].

By adding his MLA citation [Chicago 595] he totally misconstrues and deforms the Chicago style, making it seem as if the parenthetical is part of the bibliographic note! What inanity! He does this again and again and again, annoyingly. He could have done better, but did not.

And, in his discussion of citation styles, Chicago in particular, he fails to mention the towering figure of Kate Turabian and her manual in the humanities, particularly the field of history. (My own domain.) No Turabian in a history citation formatting!

His point, his thrust (I can't really call it a thesis), is that citation and documentation is important, but not taken as seriously as it should.

Of course, my own curmudgeonly opinion is that we should all use FOOTnotes, not ENDnotes, and the Turabian/CMA style. The best style ever. Well, it used to be, as the CMS style has recently seen fit to abandon Ibids after getting rid of op. cit., p. and pp., and etc. The MLA has recently decided to stop giving the place of publication too. In a world of internet, I get it. Hauptman wonders about URL citations, which are indeed tricky and ephemeral. What he would make since his 2008 publication on citation cataloging and cross-indexing that outfits like Google Scholar, EBSCOhost, JSTOR provide can be guessed.

Anyway, a hard-to-find title, with some wonderful images of old books. Only of use to ardent bibliophiles, footnotophiles, and philosophers of citation (citationology, if there is such a thing, see p. 197).… (altro)

This topic is too rarely explored within librarianship in any consistent manner. Hauptman refutes the belief that strict and mindless adherence to any simple code -- such as the ALA Code of Ethics -- will suffice to relieve the librarian of having to make reasoned choices for him/herself. In the main, professional ethics should yield to generalized ethical standards of society, although it is not difficult to see how that rule of thumb can lead to disastrous failures. What if the general community standard is that gay men and lesbians are sick and immoral individuals; shouldn't the professional obligation to provide access to information trump this prejudice? So while he isn't wrong in his criticisms, he is less successful in defending a viable alternative.… (altro)