As we are every summer, we’re hard at work on some exciting new projects and NoodleBib features for next Fall (look for upcoming announcements on this blog). Meanwhile, we continue to listen to your suggestions for how to improve the existing tools. Although they aren’t always announced, we usually do a minor update to the site about once a month. Here are a few of the more significant improvements that went into the most recent update on 6/1:

• Spell-checking on the “annotation” fields.
• Interactive parenthetical reference help (now allows you to fill in page and volume numbers to customize the parenthetical reference example for your citation)
• Revised MLA forms to handle podcasts, blogs, audioblogs, videoblogs, and online video clips (based on input from the MLA editorial staff).
• Added ability to cite a personal photograph (MLA).
• Revised APA “Web site” citation form to handle various types of “gray literature” (Powerpoint slides, white paper, fact sheet, press release, etc.) as described in the APA Style Guide to Electronic References.
• For teacher/librarian folders, “Lists Shared With Me” now displays a “status” indicator showing if a source list has been viewed/commented yet. In addition, a 30-day history of the source list can be viewed (there is a link to the log when you mouse-over the status). Finally, the number of lists shared with each class name is now displayed beside the class name.

We hope you find these changes useful!

Two minor (but potentially very helpful) changes to report:

1. For students who are registering a new personal folder under a school/district subscription, Personal IDs are no longer required to be unique to the entire NoodleTools community. They need only be unique to that subscriber (the school/district). This should make it a lot easier to create a personal folder with an ID that the student will remember. And administrators creating batches of student folders via the administrative interface shouldn’t run into the problem of student ID numbers that overlap with other schools.
2. In the administrative interface for school/district subscriptions, we’ve added a user history log that keeps a record of what has been done in each student’s folder. An entry in the log is created each time a student creates/edits/deletes/copies a citation or notecard, merges, shares, e-mails, copies a source list, etc. etc… This should help in a variety of situations. For example, the subscription administrator could analyze what happened when a student reports that some of their work is missing from their folder. To access the log, go to the “user management” area in the administrative interface, search for the user by his/her personal ID, and then click the “log” link in the results list. Note that we only started collecting data on 2/29, so this “30-day log” will not have 30 days worth of data until the end of March.

It has come to our attention that a Mozilla bug is causing a problem with dropdown menus for Mac users running Leopard OSX and FireFox version 2.0.0.9. In NoodleBib, this effects the dropdown menu that you use to select a citation type — clicking the dropdown arrow does not open the dropdown menu (although you can still use the keyboard arrow keys to traverse down the list and make a selection).

This is not something specific to the NoodleTools Web site — if you are running with this configuration, you’ll notice that certain dropdown menus (those that get built dynamically via javascript) on various Web sites just don’t…well… drop down! This is a known bug and has been fixed in the upcoming 2.0.0.10 build of FireFox (which you cannot get yet — it is due to be released in December):

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=400082

For those of you who have not updated your FireFox installation to 2.0.0.9, we recommend that you wait to update the browser until 2.0.0.10 is available in December. For those of you experiencing the issue already, you can either use the arrow keys to traverse the dropdown menu, or you can use an alternative browser for a few weeks (although you will likely experience other problems with Camino or Safari if you are trying to use the notecards feature, since we do not officially support those browsers yet). The link above also contains some information about a temporary patch, for those of you who want to try that option.

Note that this bug is only an issue on Macs running Leopard (it works on Tiger with FireFox 2.0.0.9). PC installations of FireFox are not effected either.

Update 1/5/2008: This functionality is no longer broken in the most recent FireFox update, which is 2.0.0.11. Please update your browser to this version.

While we’ve done a great job keeping the NoodleTools servers humming along even as Web traffic has increased exponentially over the past several years, sometimes something unexpected comes along that requires us to take the site offline. While infrequent, we know that this type of unexpected downtime can be frustrating (even on a Friday night, there is someone who needs access right now!).

When school sites are having trouble connecting to our Web site, they have difficulty determining whether the problem is on their side or ours. Even when planned maintenance was announced on the NoodleTools blog (make sure you’re subscribed, if you aren’t already!), users aren’t always aware of it (or just want to know when the site will be back online).

To solve this, we now have a separate Web site, www.noodletools.info, which indicates the current NoodleTools.com server status. NoodleTools.info is hosted on a different server than NoodleTools.com, so it will be accessible even when NoodleTools.com is not. If there is planned or unplanned downtime, the site will provide information and status details.

Bookmark it now!

We’ve updated the user’s guide with new screenshots and information about the new features (described in the previous blog post). You can view the new version here:

http://www.noodletools.com/tools/noodlebib_users_guide.pdf

The knowledge base will be updated next, hopefully before Monday. By the way, the features that we had hoped to squeeze in before the school year started are going to be delayed slightly. We’re moving our office at the end of August, which slows things down a bit. Those changes will be made as soon as possible, but probably not until the end of September.

Welcome back to school! We’re looking forward to working with you all again this year.

Many of you have had an opportunity to try out the new site, and we’ve gotten a lot of great positive feedback. Really the only complaint so far is that users are sometimes having trouble finding the buttons (e.g., edit/copy/delete citation) since they are just icons with no words. We’ll make sure to get that fixed before the school year starts — thanks!

As you probably noticed, most of the functionality remains the same — the improvements have more to do with usability and design than with adding features. However, there are a few feature changes we’d like to point out:

1. You can omit annotations from your final document. When you click “Print” or “Save as Word Doc” on the Bibliography screen, you now have the option to hide the annotations from the exported document.

2. The complex (and often misused) citation “labels” have gone away. Instead, you now just have the option to label citations as primary, secondary, and tertiary sources, if needed. Which leads us to #3…

3. You can sort your list in alternative ways. A “sort” dropdown at the top-right of the screen allows you to sort your list in other ways. By default, the sort order is still alphabetic. However, you also now have the option to sort/group your list by primary/secondary/tertiary sources, by currency (most recent first), or by media type.

4. The account administrator can enter a default library name and location in the subscription management “NoodleBib Customization” area, so that when a student is citing a library subscription database in NoodleBib, the library name/location is auto-filled for them.

There are many other minor tweaks that you’ll discover as you use NoodleBib more — but if you were using the software last year, you should have no trouble with the transition at all. We’re still in the process of updating the user’s guide and knowledge base to sync up with the latest version, but those should be available in about a week.

By the way, many of you have noticed the new logo… if you need one for your school library Web page, they are available in different formats and sizes here.

A quick reminder that the summer is the best time to change your school/library subscription passwords. We encourage you to do so once a year. If you are an administrator for a school subscription and you haven’t changed the login for two years or more, its time! Just follow the simple instructions in this knowledge base article. Thank you!

We’ve completed the update and we’re back up as of 2:00 AM PST. Like it? Comments welcome!

We strongly recommend that you clear your browser’s file cache now, to be sure that you don’t have pages from the old site cached.

A few notes:

• We’ll be posting a “what’s new” article to the blog in the next few days.
• The knowledge base and the user’s guide have not been updated yet — we’ll be working on those over the next week or two.
• Some pages on the site have moved — so if you find a dead link (other than in the knowledge base), please report it.

July 22nd will bring some big changes. Back in the Fall of 2006, we kicked off a 5-month usability study and Web site redesign project. We worked with one of the most talented Web design firms in the business. We interviewed teachers, librarians, and students of all ages. We visited schools and worked with individual students in the classroom to see what could be improved or simplified. And… let’s just say our “to-do” list will keep us busy for the next few years! But you’ll be seeing the first results of the study on Sunday, July 22nd — and we think you’ll be impressed! Get ready to make some updates to your lesson plans…

We’d also like to let you know what we’re working on for the remainder of 2007:

For late August:

• Additions to the APA version of NoodleBib based on the newly-released APA Style Guide to Electronic References
• Notecards speed improvements
• Improvements to “sharing” feature, including ability for teachers to comment on notecards and to provide general comments not associated with a particular citation or notecard.

For December/January:

• Chicago Manual of Style formatting (sorry we couldn’t quite fit this in for the August release!)

NoodleTools will be taken offline at approximately 2:00 PM on Saturday, July 21st. The site will most likely remain unavailable through midnight as we make the updates and do some initial testing.

Hope you are all having a wonderful summer!

Damon

Several of the school account administrators have noticed a change to the “User management” screens in the subscription management area. Namely, passwords are no longer listed along with the other personal folder information when you do a search for user folders. This change was made in response to the concerns of some schools over security. Teachers and librarians were printing out the lists of user information, which posed a risk if the printed list was misplaced, and students were using usernames/passwords for NoodleTools that they also used elsewhere.

For this reason, we no longer display the passwords in the results of user searches. If a student loses his password, the account administrator can still look up his folder — but instead of looking up the existing password, the administrator can click the link in the personal ID column. This brings up a screen where the folder information can be edited and the password can simply be reset to something else.

We are considering adding back the passwords for specific subscribers that want that — if you are an account administrator and this is something that you can’t live without, please e-mail us and let us know. Based on the feedback we receive, we may make this change.

1/4/07 update: The ability to view the plain-text passwords (i.e., revert back to the way that user management worked before this change) is now available on a per-subscriber basis. We have turned it back on for the schools and districts that specifically requested it in response to this post.