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.

Many of you have already noticed the new Analysis/Stats link in the Options menu when you are viewing your bibliography in NoodleBib. Clicking the link brings up a new screen with a series of bar graphs that categorize your entries in different ways (by medium, citation type, and by date). You may be surprised by what these graphs imply about the composition of your list.

The page is currently divided into four sections:

1. Basic Statistics (“Have I gathered enough information and met the requirements?”)
2. Medium (“Is this the right balance of print and online sources for my research?”)
3. Citation Type (“Did I make full use of the resources available to me?”)
4. Currency (“Is currency important because I am reporting on a time-sensitive issue or evolving topic?”)

This is something that we’ll be expanding on over the next month or two. We invite your feedback on the feature.

Starting next week, NoodleTools will be kicking off a three-month usability study and Web site redesign project. We’ll be working hand-in-hand with one of the most talented Web design firms out there. The study will include both NoodleBib and the Web site design as a whole. The month of October will be devoted to the research stage of this project. We’ll be spending time clarifying our own vision for the site. But even more importantly, our design team would like to talk to some of YOU to get your feedback on our ideas and understand exactly what your needs are.

Are you interested in participating in this study?

If you are a teacher or librarian who has used NoodleBib with groups of students and has explored the rest of the NoodleTools Web site in some depth, we’d like to hear your ideas (the good, the bad, and especially the ugly!). If you’d be willing to participate in an interview with our design team in the month of October, please contact us and let us know. Please include the following information in your message: (1) your name, (2) your school/organization, (3) your position at that location, (4) your e-mail and phone number, and (5) your availability (if you will be unavailable in October at any point). Also, if you think some of your students might be interested in participating in a verbal or written interview, please let us know — we’re very interested in their ideas as well.

The new notecards component in NoodleBib is now available to all subscribers!

We hope that you have some time to play with the new feature this summer — please feel free to e-mail us with questions or to report problems so that we can work out any issues before the start of the school year. Note that the notecard feature relies on technologies that are only supported by these browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer: Versions 6.x and higher (not supported on Mac)
• Mozilla Firefox: Version 1.5 and higher (PC and Mac)
• Netscape Browser: Version 8.1 and higher

We’ve updated the NoodleBib user’s guide. We strongly encourage teachers and librarians to read the new chapter on notecards to gain an understanding of how the new feature compliments the existing citation software. Keep in mind that if you don’t want to use the feature at your school or library, you can turn it off through the subscription management area NoodleBib Customization option.

The user’s guide also covers several other features that were added since August last year. For example, if you aren’t aware of the optional citation labels (”tags”) feature introduced back in December, now you can learn all about it. Citation labels are disabled by default, so you need to enable them in the subscription management area if you want to use them at your location.

The static NoodleBib tour is being replaced with a series of Flash tutorials. One is up now and the others will be added in the next few weeks.

The online knowledge base has not yet been updated for this release — I’ll post a note here when that task is complete. Update: The knowledge base has now been updated (8/4/06).

Write us and let us know what you think!

This summer’s NoodleBib update (scheduled for Saturday, July 30th) includes a new feature that many of you have been anticipating — notecards! If you are someone who tried Google Notebook when it was released recently and thought “wow, something like this would be useful for taking notes for a research paper” then this is just the thing for you!

In a nutshell:

1. Link notecards to sources in your bibliography (or create “thought” cards that aren’t associated with a particular entry).
2. View notecards alongside bibliography entries (in the My Bibliography view), or organize notecards into main ideas (”clusters”) in a separate My Notes view.
3. Copy and paste anything (images, tables, formatting, etc.) from the Web into your notecards. Separate “Quote,” “Paraphrase,” and “My Ideas” fields to promote good notetaking skills and help prevent plagiarism.
4. Save notecards as an RTF file to open and manipulate in your word processor.
5. Apply any number of tags to each notecard (and then later search notecards by tag(s)).
6. Dynamic user interface similar to Google Notebook (organize notecards into clusters with drag/drop, show/hide details, quick-access links to clusters).
7. Uses AJAX to save your work in the background (no screen refreshes) as you go.
8. Notecards feature can be turned off by the account administrator via the subscription management interface, if it won’t be used.

Here are some preview screenshots of the notecards feature (click the thumbnail to open a larger image):

Note: Since this feature uses cutting-edge DHTML and AJAX technologies, only the following browsers will initially be supported (upgrade to these at your school if you plan to use this feature!):

• Internet Explorer 6+ or 7+
• Firefox 1.5+ (Mac or PC)
• Netscape 8.1+

Want to save your class some time? A new option in the subscription management area allows account administrators to import a batch of student folders into NoodleBib. Log in and click the “User Management” link to access the new feature. To generate a batch of student folders, follow the simple directions to specify folder information (personal ID; password; phone number) for each folder you wish to generate. A default password and 4-digit phone number that you select will be used if you omit the password or phone number in any of your entries.

As an example, you might select “testme” as the default password and “9999″ as the default phone number, and then enter the following into the import field:

NoodleTest1
NoodleTest2;newpass
NoodleTest3;newpass;1111
NoodleTest4;;2222

This would result in 4 new student folders associated with your subscription:

Personal ID: NoodleTest1 - Password: testme - Phone: 9999
Personal ID: NoodleTest2 - Password: newpass - Phone: 9999
Personal ID: NoodleTest3 - Password: newpass - Phone: 1111
Personal ID: NoodleTest4 - Password: testme - Phone: 2222

If something is wrong (e.g., a personal ID already exists, a password is too short, etc.), the screen will let you know what needs to be changed. After you make the necessary modification(s), just click the “Import Folders” button again. You can create up to 100 folders per batch, and each batch is tagged with the date and a description that you provide, allowing you to view the folders in a particular batch at a later date.