Congratulations to the winners of the 2016 CHA-SHC awards. If you were not able to attend to gala at which the prizes were announced during Congress 2016 at the University of Calgary, they you can read the list of winners the CHA now has on its website.
Here is one thing I noticed about that list. Winners who published in academic journals and with academic presses have their publication fully referenced in the list. The journal, the volume, the page numbers – all there. The press, the city and year – that too. I reviewed Mark Kuhlberg’s latest book for Ontario History this year, so his book jumped out at me – it won the Political History Group’s prize for best book. Here is how it is listed.
Mark Kuhlberg, IN THE POWER OF THE GOVERNMENT: THE RISE AND FALL OF NEWSPRINT IN ONTARIO, 1894-1932. Toronto: UTP, 2015.
Makes perfect sense: if you want to go and find these things you use this information to go get the article or book. That’s one of the reasons referencing is important. It provides accessibility and transparency, goals I think most academics support, and ones public institutions are certainly under pressure to live up to.
These standards are not met by the entries for the Public History Prize and The Canadian Oral History Association Prize. They appear as follows.
ActiveHistory doesn’t even get a “.ca”, and none of its editors are named. You can find them here. Being familiar with Active History, I know what it is and where to find it. But that’s not the case for Radu’s, Healing in Chisasibi. Was this a museum exhibit, a video production, a publication – what? And available where?
The CHA is largely a scholarly association and that doesn’t need to change, but it should pay more attention to how it represents work in non-academic settings. Plenty of academics are active in these areas, and the public interfaces with the non-academic history world more than it does the academic one. If those aren’t reason enough to revise the format for these two entries, then the fact that they do not meet scholarly referencing standards should.
Citation
Nathan Smith, “And the 2016 CHA Prize Winners Are…,” 2 June 2016, HIS241.com, http://www.his241.com/?p=310
