The user’s guide has been updated to reflect the addition of Chicago/Turabian formatting and some features that have been added over the past few months (see previous blog entries). The corresponding knowledge base articles will be updated over the next week as well.

Also, with the latest statistics now indicating that Google’s Chrome is getting some significant usage, we spent some time testing NoodleBib under that browser. That went very well, and we’re pleased to announce that we will be supporting Google Chrome as a browser option effective immediately.

I’d like to provide a quick update on our plans for supporting the changes introduced in the MLA Style Manual and Guide to Scholarly Publishing (3rd ed.). Based on what we have learned from MLA, we have decided not to make any updates in NoodleBib yet to support the new formatting. MLA has specifically recommended that “undergraduate and high school students should continue to follow guidelines in the sixth edition of the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers until the seventh edition is released in spring 2009.”

We are pleased to (officially) announce that Chicago/Turabian bibliography-notes formatting will be available in NoodleBib starting September 1st. All subscribing users will automatically have access to the new formatting option, and it will also be available as part of the free NoodleBib Express tool (which allows you to create individual citations).

There are two “bibles” of Chicago style — Turabian’s A Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations (7th ed.) and The Chicago Manual of Style (15th ed.). There are a few differences between the two guides (most significantly, the noticeable lack of coverage of online sources in the Chicago Manual of Style). We decided to stick with Turabian’s Manual for Writers (which is written more with a student in mind) as our “primary” guide for the new feature. In the same way, we use the MLA Handbook as our primary guide for MLA formatting (written for secondary school and college students), rather than the MLA Style Manual (written for graduate students and scholarly authors).

We look forward to working with you all again this school year!

Our users know that NoodleTools is unique because we focus on helping teachers and students learn. Not mindless fill-in-the-blanks software, NoodleBib is a powerful and accurate citation and notetaking program where students get the support they need when they need it. Throughout the research process students are learning to investigate analytically, think critically, articulate ideas clearly and document their evidence accurately.

Sharing these goals, Pearson Education recognized that we were the right partner for the next generation of their writing software. We’re delighted to announce that NoodleBib is seamlessly integrated into the new version of Pearson’s MyCompLab, a writing instruction environment. From the MyCompLab composing space, a student can click the “Cite sources” link in the Writer’s Toolkit to open NoodleBib, create a source list and notecards, and then import that work directly back into the MyCompLab editor. Users will find NoodleBib a slick fit with MyCompLab’s intuitive composing space and writing instruction resources.

[ click image for full-size view ]

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About Pearson: Pearson Education is the global leader in educational publishing, providing scientifically research-based print and digital programs to help students learn at their own pace, in their own way. “The new MyCompLab empowers student writers and facilitates writing instruction by uniquely integrating a composing space and ePortfolio with proven resources and tools. In this revolutionary application, students receive feedback within the context of their own writing—encouraging critical thinking and revision while honing their skills based on individual needs. Administrative features developed specifically for writing instruction bring instructors closer to their student writers, make managing assignments and evaluating papers more efficient, and save instructors time.” More…

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.