Presented on Friday 18 November 2011 at Materiality and Virtuality: A Conference on Comics, Comics Forum 2011, Leeds Art Gallery, UK. http://comicsforum.org/comics-forum-2011/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

1. Back to the Source: Notes on the Importance of Guidelines for Citation of Comic Art in the Digital Age Dr Ernesto Priego

2. "There are in fact several reasons, apart from purely autobiographical ones, why I am writing about comics. I have been bothered for a long time that it is nigh on impossible to see the original materials being analysed in most critical studies. Too many critics expect to take their descriptions on faith. Often they tell us their conclusion with only fragmentary quotations. When studying pieces of popular culture, very often they do not bother to note their sources. No dates, no edition numbers. It doesn't seem to matter, since their description must be accepted. This is not a matter to be taken lightly. The way critics look at their materials is already conditioned by their theories of ideology and influence. If we want to question those theories, it is vitally important to be able to re-view those original materials." Martin Barker, Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics , 1989:5.

3. Comics / Scholarship Silo / Ghetto

4. How to integrate comics scholarship within the larger scholarly community whilst retaining its specificity? How to enable its growth and maximise its impact?

5. Citing Sources is Not Enough! (but it's the beginning) &quot;Comic Art in Scholarly Writing. A Citation Guide&quot; < http://www.comicsresearch.org/CAC/cite.html > Allen Ellis Chair, Comics Citations Committee Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association

6. Citing, Showing, Connecting Citing/Embedding/ Referencing/Linking/ Networking Hyperlinking transforms citation into active networking The Comics Grid

7. &quot;What is interesting is always interconnection. Not the primacy of this over that, which has never any meaning. &quot; –Michel Foucault, 1982 ( Foucault 1999:141).

8. &quot;The new culture of hypermedia has given rise to even more interaction between text and image. The ease with which we can manipulate images, combine them with text, and reproduce them instantaneously is changing the old order of readability, forcing us to rethink the concept of textuality. The literary text, if it is to have a future, will no longer be able to evade these new challenges.&quot; –Christian Vandendorpe, 1999 (Vandendorpe 2009:96).

10. Citation is a synthetic and analytic process Citing is a way of describing content Ciation standards express cultural & scholarly values (ideology)

11. &quot;The Definitional Project&quot; Still Matters What is a comic?

12. In the digital age, form = content content = form &quot;content is king&quot;

13. Comics Scholarship / Librarianship Information Literacy as Basic Scholarly Skill

14. &quot; A major reason that there are not enough histories, analyses and reference books about comics is that collecting comics is a very difficult job, and libraries have not been collecting well enough.&quot; Randy Scott, Comics Librarianship. A Handbook , 1990:9.

15. &quot;[Comics librarianship] is very difficult if you don't know that you have everything related to something when you're trying to get it organised&quot; -L ucy Caswell, Subject Librarian of the Ohio State University cartoon collection ( Tauber 2009).

16. Image / Word In comics as in contemporary multi/hyper/trans/digital media, image and word = text image and word = single object of study

17. Print / Digital The &quot;standard&quot; format of comics is no longer (only) print. The &quot;technical unit&quot; might not always be the comics page, not even the panel. The &quot;standard&quot; academic output is no longer (only) print.

18. Comics research is increasingly conducted online. Comics scholars rarely have access to all the primary sources they need in physical formats.

19. The elephant in the room is not Google; it's access to materials through illegal torrents.

20. Terms Comics Scholars Look For

23. Markup/Encoding/Tagging

27. Guidelines? Why? Enabling Access to Knowledge Effective Resource Sharing Enabling Collaboration Ensure Academic Rigour Maximise Research Impact Licensing / fair use / copyright awareness Sustainable Preservation Interoperability; common frameworks Compliance with digital standards

28. If it can't be found, it does not exist! Only those who already know what they are searching do find it Comics scholars can facilitate access to primary sources through citation standards that allow their location to third parties

29. Comics Scholarship's Arch-Enemies Copyright (or ignorance of) Lack of citation & classification standards (taxonomies; metadata) Lack of ease of access to primary sources, particulary to non-insiders

30. Licensing/Fair Use for Teaching, Conference Presentations & Publications

36. Communities can produce comics-specialised &quot;foksonomies&quot;; standards can be gradually introduced

37. Information Literacy Standards Association of College and Research Libraries American Library Association http://www.ala.org/

38. The Comics Scholar as Information Professional Creation of interoperable <metadata> as textual scholarship

39. Discoverability: if it can't be found, it can't be studied; the less it's studied, the less it's found &quot;Online, there is only metadata&quot; -Graham Bell, Editeur/HarperCollins, 2011

40. Since 2008, The Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at Ohio State University has been digitising specific comic book collections using Encoded Archival Description as an online finding aid, finally making them browsable and searchable by image and text. < http://osu.pastperfect-online.com/ >

41. Ohio State

42. Grand Comics Database

43. Metadata Makes Its Possible

44. Learning Resource Metadata Initiative (LRMI) Creative Commons & the Association of Educational Publishers to establish a common learning resources framework aimed at improving education search and discovery via a common framework for tagging and organizing learning resources on the web. < http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/27603 >