We will be upgrading our primary and replication/backup servers in three weeks, starting the evening of Friday, November 6th. While the upgrade will be complete Friday night, we will likely keep the server offline for testing the morning of Saturday, November 7th. Please plan accordingly!

Update: The server will be taken offline at approximately 6 PM PST on Friday evening. Our goal is to complete testing on Friday night and be back online by midnight, but if there are any issues, we may keep the server offline on Saturday morning. Please check http://www.noodletools.info/ for updates.

Update (8:00 PM PST): The upgrades are complete. Everything went smoothly and quite a bit faster than expected. Tests looked great, so we’ve put the server back online. Enjoy!

Some of you have probably noticed that when you ask questions about how to use features in NoodleBib, we’ve started referring you to sections of our new Web version of the NoodleBib User’s Guide, rather than to the Knowledge Base. We will no longer be putting these types of articles in the knowledge base — the knowledge base will be mainly reserved for addressing tricky citation questions.

The advantages of the new version of the user’s guide are numerous:

1. We can easily keep it up to date, since it is automatically generated from the Word/PDF version of the user’s guide.

2. The search mechanism for finding articles related to your question is MUCH better than it was in the knowledge base, where search results were often inconsistent.

3. When we refer you to an individual article, it displays the article within the context of the chapter/section where it is located in the user’s guide, which is often helpful.

4. Individual sections within the user’s guide can be bookmarked and/or printed.

Note that the PDF version of the user’s guide is also still available (if you open the Web version, you’ll see a PDF icon at the top-right of the screen). But I expect that most users will opt for the Web version now. Let us know what you think!

APA 6th edition

The first stage of the APA 6th edition update to NoodleBib is now live (see the previous blog post for additional information about the APA update schedule). If you open an existing APA list in your folder, you will be prompted to convert it to 6th edition formatting, but as we did with the MLA update, you also have the option to save the list with 5th edition formatting as a Word document first. This update includes:

• Significant changes to the URL/database field prompts, as described (primarily) in section 6.32 of the APA Publication Manual. The rules for what URL to include for a given source is a little more complex in the 6th edition. NoodleBib lists the applicable rules in the order you’ll need to consider them next to the URL field. You’ll notice that another thing we’ve done is to provide spaces for students to provide online retrieval information like a URL, database name, or database accession number even in cases for when those pieces of data are not actually required in the citation. For example, when citing a journal article in a database, the DOI (if there is one) or the home page URL of the journal is required in the citation (not the name or URL of the database it was retrieved from). Allowing the student to still provide a URL or database information in these cases helps the student (and the instructor) locate and review these sources.
• Along these same lines, the user is no longer required to select the online retrieval type (database vs. website) up front — we simply prompt for the information on the main form.
• Formatting of contributor names has been updated. Up to seven authors/contributors are listed normally, or if there are more than 7, the first 6 are given followed by “. . .” and then the final contributor is given last. See example 2 in the 6th edition for a citation that uses this, as well as this recent APA Style Blog post.
• Formatting changes for a number of citation types, including books, dissertations, newsgroups, electronic mailing lists, web forums, and blogs
• Changes to the sound recording citation type to include the option of citing podcasts and other audio files online
• Changes to the film or video recording citation type to include the option of citing video blog posts or other video files online
• Minor changes to the help text and advanced help popups to mirror the guidance in the new edition.

Chicago/Turabian changes

We’ve made some improvements and corrections to the way we handle online sources in the Chicago/Turabian tool. A knowledge base article will be forthcoming about these changes. You’ll notice, however, that we no longer prompt the user to select between a source being in a database or a Web site. And the shortened bibliography form used in Turabian 17.5.9 is no longer used (a full bibliography entry is created) — a change that teachers have been requesting for some time.

Notecard improvements

We’ve made some improvements to the Bibliography screen that we didn’t have time to get in during our summer update. This update includes:

• All notecards can now be viewed on the Bibliography screen. Notecards that are not associated with any source are called “Thought Cards” and are displayed above the first citation.
• A new Notecard Display options bar near the top of the Bibliography screen allows you to show or hide notecards in different ways. Show/hide all will quickly show or hide every notecard that you have created (and this now becomes a view very similar to the old Notecards screen, where all notecards were simply displayed in full, as a list). Show/hide Thought Cards allows you to show or hide just the notecards that do not have a source association. And finally (and perhaps most importantly), the Show only notecards that have comments option allows you to open only the notecards on which an instructor has written a comment, and close all others (this allows a student to efficiently review a teacher’s feedback).
• Commenting from the Bibliography screen has been streamlined for the instructor. Each citation and notecard on the screen is now followed by a Comments box, so the instructor can quickly write comments on several items without reloading the page at all.

Let us know what you think! We have a few more improvements for the comments feature that are coming in the next few weeks — we’ll announce them soon.

User’s Guide update
We’ve finished and posted a draft of the new user’s guide, although as you can see, things are still changing a little as we finish off the changes to the new notecards screen. Take a look!

We’ve been busy updating the knowledge base articles for MLA 7th edition, and now we need to comb through the APA articles for the new edition as well. Thank you for you patience with this. Additional screencast tutorials are also in the works.

We’ll be addressing the changes in the new edition of the APA Publication Manual in two stages. We’ll aim to have part one of the update complete by Monday, September 7th. Part one will be to make changes to the citation types that are already available in NoodleBib, to bring them in line with new APA formatting requirements. This will include:

• Changes to online retrieval information: Updates to when the citation should include a DOI, the URL of a periodical/publisher’s Web site, the home page URL of an archival database, a database’s name, or an exact URL to difficult-to-locate online sources.
• Change in how authors/contributors are listed (up to 7 names, or using an ellipsis when there are 8 or more).
• Change in instructions for when to include a journal’s issue number.
• Removal of publication details for an online book.
• Formatting changes for dissertations/theses.
• Formatting changes for newsgroups, mailing lists, etc.

This first update will insure that any citations created in NoodleBib will conform to the 6th edition APA guidelines. Part two of the update will be started after part one is complete, and will focus on new citation types that are not yet included in NoodleBib. This includes:

• Audio podcasts
• Video webcasts
• Advance online publication of a periodical article
• Online-only supplemental material in a periodical
• Unpublished, informally published or self-archived works
• Archival documents and collections

A schedule for part two of the update will be posted soon after the part one update is completed.

Well, it took a day longer than anticipated to work out some kinks, but the new version of NoodleBib is finally here. Included in this release:

1. MLA 7th edition formatting

Any new MLA bibliographies that you create starting now will be formatted based on the 7th edition of the MLA Handbook. If you have an MLA list in your folder, you will be prompted to convert it when you click to open it from the My Lists screen. You cannot continue to edit existing MLA lists using 6th edition formatting, so you are required to update if you want to continue editing the list in NoodleBib. However, the conversion screen also does give you the option of saving your existing (6th edition) list out as an RTF file that you can open in Word, if you do want a copy of it in that form as well.

2. Chicago/Turabian Legal Citations

We’ve added a number of legal source citation options for Chicago style bibliographies. Court cases, Federal or State bills, resolutions, reports, documents, hearings, regulations…. Well, you get the point!

3. Notecards

Notecards have a whole new look in this version of NoodleBib. Since releasing the original notecards feature a few years ago, we’ve had the opportunity to visit a number of classrooms and talked with many of our users about how we could make notecards more functional. The most common request was that you wanted to be able to view, organize and manipulate large numbers of notecards easily. A lot of teachers were asking students to write 50-100 notecards, and the old interface just couldn’t do a good job with that many notes — with so much data on the screen at once, it could take a long time to load, it became difficult to see what you had, and reorganizing notecards into clusters was difficult.

NoodleBib now organizes your notecards for you on a virtual tabletop. You can easily create notes (using a familiar template that you’ll recognize from the old version) and then visually organize them into piles using drag-and-drop. Just drop one notecard onto another notecard to create a pile, as you would do with paper notecards on your desk. And there’s more!

• Create an outline as well, link notecards you’ve created with subtopics in your outline, and even export your outline with the notecards included
• Search your notecards by keyword, tag, or by source
• Add not just regular word tags, but colors and visual cues as well
• Teachers can comment directly on notecards

There are definitely things that we’re still working on with this, but we wanted to make sure that it was released in time for teachers to get a feeling for it before school started. We’re aware of some minor bugs that we’ll be fixing over the next few weeks, but please do e-mail us as you start to experiment with it if you have suggestions or find a bug.

4. Tutorials

We’ve begun to create a series of short screencasts, trying to stay under 2 minutes for each. The first few of these are available here, and we’ll be putting many more of them up in the next few months.

5. PowerPoints

New PowerPoint presentations are available here. They can be useful to present NoodleBib to students or staff, or to get an overview of what NoodleBib is all about.

6. User’s Guide and knowledge base updates (coming)

The User’s Guide and knowledge base are now being being updated for the new version of NoodleBib and for the MLA 7th edition changes. We will post an entry on the blog when this is complete. The user’s guide should be available in about 2 weeks. The knowledge base may take a little longer, but the goal is to have it done before the end of the month.

7. Next steps

We have a growing team of developers here already working on some new things, including:

1. APA 6th edition update: APA came out with the 6th edition of their APA Publication Manual, so we’re in the process of reviewing the changes and deciding what to change (compared to the MLA update, the APA changes are fairly small).
2. Rework of teacher comments/feedback system: While we did add the ability for teachers to add comments on the notecards as well as the citations, that was really more of a temporary fix until we could get to what we really wanted to do, which is to redesign the way the comments are written and read. A more centralized system, where all the comments can be read in one place, students can respond to comments, and more.
3. More to come, but (yawn) we need some sleep now…!

Here is the final update schedule for our upcoming release, which includes MLA 7th edition formatting, a rework of the notecards feature, Chicago/Turabian legal citations, and additional features and bugfixes:

• We will take the server offline Friday evening at approximately 9:00 PM PST.
• Since this is a big update and will require thorough testing on the primary servers, we will keep the site offline on Saturday, August 1st (exact time TBD, but you can just assume it will be unavailable for most of Saturday).
• The site will be available on Sunday, August 2nd.

Note that APA 6th edition changes will not be part of this 8/1 release. However, we are in the process of reviewing the changes in the new edition of the APA Publication Manual, and will post again on the blog soon, once we have a timeline for those changes.

The following updates are scheduled for 7/31 – 8/2/09 (exact date/time TBD):

1. MLA 7th ed. update
2. Chicago/Turabian legal citation forms
3. Notecards update (see previous post)

We are aware that the 6th edition the APA Publication Manual is being published in July. Depending on the scope of the changes, we will decide how and when to proceed with updating NoodleBib.

Three years ago we integrated online notecards into the NoodleBib citation software. Since we didn’t know how (or if) teachers and students would use it, we designed it to be as simple and flexible as possible. Since then, the notecards feature has been “discovered” and today is being used in thousands of schools with great success. Virtually all schools that originally subscribed only to the citation software are now also using the notecards.

Over the last two years, we’ve visited classrooms to observe and interact with students using NoodleBib’s notecards for research projects. Our observations and the feedback that we’ve received from these early adopters (and from many other users) has been invaluable. They are the backbone for the changes to the notecards feature that we’ll release this summer.

Over the next few months you will be getting more detailed information, but we couldn’t resist giving you a sneak peek now. Click the thumbnail below to see our first published screenshot of the new online notecard interface (if you are using IE, you’ll probably want to disable automatic image resizing, to view the screenshot without distortion).

Note: A stand-alone version of the notecards tool is pictured here. The version integrated into NoodleBib will look similar.

The new software models how a student might pile up and play with the organization of real notecards on a physical table top. A student can:

• Stack notecards by dragging one on top of another;
• Mouse-over notecards or stacks to view a quick summary of their contents;
• Label notecards not only with text-based tags, but also with visual symbols and colors for various tasks and reminders (e.g., “Important,” “Need help,” etc.);
• Navigate around a virtual “tabletop” that is larger than the monitor’s screen size using a map (see bird’s eye view in the bottom-left hand corner of the screenshot in which each dot represents a notecard);
• Search notecards by any keyword, tag, or source, then manipulate the search results efficiently (e.g., search for all of the notecards tagged “habitat” and stack them with one click);
• View and edit within the popular current interface of NoodleBib notecards (old notecards will migrate automatically to the new interface);
• Create an outline, then slide notecards onto topics or subtopics in the outline (the software keeps track of what has been already used);
• Print and save the final outline filled with content as a single word-processed document.
• Read teachers comments and questions directly on the notecards just as easily as they see comments on citations now.

The 7th edition of the MLA Handbook will be published this April (pre-order now). NoodleBib will be incorporating these changes as part of a July 2009 update. The 3rd edition of the MLA Style Manual came out in 2008, and based on our discussions with the editors, the changes in the Style Manual will for the most part be mirrored in the new edition of the MLA Handbook. However, we have chosen not to make changes until July for the following reasons:

1. Changes in the middle of the school year would be confusing for students (and teachers).
2. Some types of citations (like mailing lists, forums, and blog entries) are not addressed in the MLA Style Manual.
3. There may be minor differences between the Style Manual and the Handbook, since they are targeted to different audiences. Based on our thorough analysis of the changes in the new Style Manual, we’ve submitted feedback to MLA about some potential improvements/clarifications that could be made in the Handbook. We’ll see what comes of that (they’ve listened to us before).

Please note that our telephone support number has changed to (650) 561-4071.