On 12/21/06, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: Read your own words; "Seems like an obvious conclusion to me..." You are drawing your own conclusions, rather than quoting others who have drawn those conclusions. In addition, by definition it is a *novel* conclusion; if it weren't novel, then you'd be able to quote someone who had come to the same conclusion. Jay.

On 12/22/06, Ken Arromdee <arromdee(a)rahul.net> wrote: But we're not talking about trivially obvious conclusions; rather, we're talking about conclusions based on complex actions that require expert knowledge to conduct correctly, and even then don't always produce accurate results. The only *obvious* conclusion we can draw in this case is "Daniel Smith ran this specific search on the catalog, and it didn't return any results", which is hardly encyclopedic information. Jay.

On 12/21/06, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton(a)gmail.com> wrote: You may have made a mistake. Or it may be in the library but not in the catalogue, or vice versa. That you conducted the search yourself makes publication of your results OR. We publish the mistakes of reliable sources, not of Wikipedians. :-)

jayjg wrote: I would disagree, and say that it is a claim made by the library catalogue, and thus properly sourced to them. The claim may be one made by omission, but, insofar as the catalogue claims to be comprehensive, it is nonetheless an unambiguous claim. If the catalogue does not claim to be comprehensive, or if there is doubt about its accuracy, it may be better to phrase the statement explicitly as "his book is not listed in the Cornell University Library catalogue." None of the problems previously mentioned with legal databases apply to library catalogues, which I would rather compare to other common catalogue works such as phone books and dictionaries. In fact, ten or twenty years ago, one could even have pointed to the filing cabinets full of index cards and said "here's your printed source". :-) Or would you also consider the statement "IttyBittySoft was not listed in the Fortune 500 list for 2006" to be OR? -- Ilmari Karonen

jayjg wrote: By that logic, books don't make claims either, they simply exist. A official library catalog constitues a very clear unambiguous claim by the library that "our library contains these books." If the catalog is described as a comprehensive one, it includes the further claim "...and no others." We source it to the catalog, as published by the library, as it existed on the date it was checked. Just as we would source claims about the inclusion of a company on the Fortune 500 list to the list itself, as published by _Fortune_. <ref>[[Cornell University Library]] [http://catalog.library.cornell.edu/ catalog]. URL accessed on December 11, 2006.</ref> For bonus points, include the direct link to the search results. This would be comparable to mentioning a specific page when citing a book: recommended, but not required. For extra bonus points, include a link to an archived copy of the results on webcitation.org. Books can have errors too, and it's possible to misunderstand them. Does not mean we have to stop citing them. Presumably because some other source (most likely IttyBittySoft themselves) did in fact claim they were "one of America's 100 largest corporations" or something to that effect. That would be absurd, of course, but you'd be surprised what claims people might make. (See f.ex. [[Office of International Treasury Control]].) Or maybe an otherwise credible source confused them with Microsoft (and never bothered to publish a correction). -- Ilmari Karonen

phoebe ayers wrote: Yes, but I don't believe anyone was suggesting to cite a library catalog in support of a claim about all the books in the world -- that would be as absurd as basing a claim about all the people in the world on a single biography. The difference is that, at least for some library catalogs, the subset of books they cover is well defined (all the books in library X) and of potentially legitimate interest in an encylopedia article. -- Ilmari Karonen