On 22 Jul 2010, at 00:30, David Goodman wrote:

Why would anyone cite this particular edition?

Either because it's the copy they have in their hand, or because they're talking about the material/cultural conditions surrounding it. (Significant differences from other editions, things special about who/when/why/how it was published, knowledge that a copy of this edition was used by a particular person at a particular time.)

It's not the first ed.,
which is, I think,
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL23411638M/inland_voyage.

it's not even the first american edition. It's not a standard
scholarly edition. It's not an earlier collected edition. It's not an
edition which is currently in print. What's more, it's a defective
record, because the date on the displayed cover does not match the
date of the edition on the catalog record--which is the date on the
title page of the actual copy scanned, which does not have the
original cover. The cover was selected by an automatic algorithm,
which got it wrong.

Funny, the cover that I'm looking at matches the title page internet archive edition:

If we're going to standardize citations, we should standardize a
correct record to an appropriate version, not any version that happens
along. Of course, that's considerably harder.

Mostly it's hard to know what "appropriate" means. To know whether two things are the same or different, we need to know the purpose/intended use.

On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Edward Betts <edward@archive.org> wrote:
http://openlibrary.org/books/OL17963918M/An_inland_voyage

--
David Goodman, Ph.D, M.L.S.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:DGG

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