You may have noticed that the “Expiration date” column mysteriously disappeared from the “My Folder” view in NoodleBib. The reason? We’ve removed the one-year expiration on source lists. The source lists you create will be there as long as your folder is used.

The feature:
If you are a NoodleTools account administrator, you now have the ability to change the subscription password(s) for your school/district/library through the subscription management area (you were previously required to e-mail us with your change requests). You may make the changes at any time, although most likely you will want to do so over the summer vacation each year.

The reason:
The primary reason that you would want to change the subscription password(s) is to prevent students who have graduated from continuing to use your school’s or district’s subscription. Once you change the password, users MAY be required to “revalidate” their folders the next time they log in to NoodleBib (see next section for the exceptions).

The user experience:
When you change the subscription password, users who have existing folders associated with your organization will be flagged as “need to revalidate.” Whether or not they are prompted to manually revalidate their folder depends on how they are authenticated into your subscription. If authenticated via IP or referring URL authentication, the student’s folder will be automatically revalidated, and they will log in as normal. However, if they are not automatically authenticated, they will be brought to a new screen after they enter their personal ID and password that prompts them to enter the organization’s current username and password (or in the case of some public libraries, a barcode number).

Do I have to?
While we will not absolutely require you to change the password(s) annually, we do strongly recommend it. An e-mail will be sent out in June to remind you to make the changes over the summer.

How do I change the password(s)?
Follow these steps to change your organization’s password(s):

1. Log in to your subscription management area
2. Click “Subscription Management”
3. Click “Change Subscription Password(s)”
4. The date that each password was last changed is listed. Change the password(s) and click “Save changes” to finish. Passwords must be at least 3 characters in length, but other than that, there are no restrictions.

Several NoodleBib account administrators have requested that they be allowed to delete old or unused (or test/demo) folders, so we’ve enabled this in the subscription management area. There is no limit to the number of folders that can be created under a school’s or district’s subscription, but some occasional spring cleaning is sometimes useful. We don’t completely remove the folder (in case of accidental deletion) — we simply flag it as deleted and free up the associated personal ID.

Instructions:

1. Log in to the subscription management area
2. Click “User Management”
3. Define search criteria (or leave search fields blank to browse all folders) and click the “Search” button
4. Scroll down to the results list and mark the checkbox next to the folders you wish to delete
5. Click the “Remove selected folders” button at the bottom

We’ve checked in a few minor improvements this evening:

1. Ability for teacher/librarian to edit and delete comments on shared lists.
2. Ability for student to hide comments from view. If a comment represents a suggestion or task issued by a teacher, this is analogous to marking the item “complete.”
3. MLA document formatting: Option to add a carriage return between an entry and its annotation.
4. Fixed placement of period in relationship to multiple quotes (thank you to S. Grubb on LM_NET for doing the legwork on this). For example, in the following article title, the period should appear before both quotation marks (not between the single and double quotation marks):

   “My Review of ‘Short Story X.’”

Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need has been updated!

Motivation for change

For well over fifteen years, From Now On has shaped the thinking of librarians and educators in the U.S. and abroad. Jamie McKenzie’s ongoing analysis of teaching and learning, school technology and information problem-solving is delightfully provocative and timely, and shaped by his practical experience as a teacher and administrator and the in-depth work he does in schools. When Jamie recently asked us for permission to reproduce “Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need” for an article he was writing on the deep web, we decided that we’d better take a careful look at every line of our advice.

The history

“Choose” was created in 1996, four years after Debbie Abilock’s school was wired by parents and teachers and three years after the first Web browser, Mosaic, was deployed. It was apparent that students were confused about what to use (Gopher? Veronica? FTP?) and what they needed (gateway? data? document? image?), but most online advice was framed in terms of “do this, try that” with the assumption that the searcher had already identified and articulated a need — certainly not true of the students Debbie was teaching or of the teachers in the multi-year PIPE initiative (Public/Private Internet Project for Education) for which she served as Project Manager. As part of the professional development for PIPE’s 10 public and private schools, Debbie expanded “Choose” from a single screen to a very long Web page of advice to help PIPE teachers work together online to develop cross-site cooperative curriculum in order to improve the education of all their students. Apparently, the idea of asking the user to identify a need for information before selecting a search strategy brought other visitors to the school library’s Web site. The popularity of the static “Choose” page served as the inspiration for NoodleQuest, an interactive version that provides a search strategy recommendation given a combination of information needs.

The update

Despite their similarity in content, “Choose” and NoodleQuest haven’t stayed in sync because each was a static, hand-edited page. However, with our recent rework of NoodleQuest, this has changed. “Choose” is now auto-generated from the content in NoodleQuest (with less elaborate descriptions of the recommended sites so that “Choose” remains concise and easy to visually scan), and NoodleQuest sports a nifty administration interface that allows us to make changes easily and often. Both tools stay consistent with eachother, and updates are frequent. Thanks to Jamie, “Choose The Best Search for Your Information Need” has morphed into a dynamic, ever-improving page organized into logical categories, with links to some extraordinary new deep web sources, social software search tools and multimedia search engines. We’ve dumped some obvious needs that seemed less useful because, with 5.48 billion American searches in January — 42% on Google and another 43% on Yahoo and MSN — the need “to find a few good hits fast” doesn’t seem as urgent as in those earlier Mosaic moments. And we’ve added some advice relating to defining and refining a topic that teachers requested.

We’re proud of the work we’ve done to reorganize a page that business employees refer to during their work day, and that has been linked to, printed and used for teaching in schools and universities worldwide. Most recently we granted permission to a Professor of Communications to reprint”Choose” in an Allyn and Bacon textbook he’s writing called Principles and Types of Public Speaking.

We invite your feedback!

We’ve added a few often-requested citation types to NoodleBib MLA Starter (the free tool):

Journal
Film or video recording
Lecture, speech, address, or reading
Television or radio program

Disclaimer: As always, the MLA Starter forms have been kept extremely simple, as they are designed for elementary school (and potentially some middle school) students. While this makes them easier to use, this also means that there are sources that a student will not be able to cite without using the MLA Advanced tool.

It shook us up a little last year when NoodleQuest was voted one of PC Magazine’s “Top 100 Sites” for Spring 2005, alongside other search tools like A9 and Clusty. While Debbie’s popular Choose the Best Search for Your Information Need page is kept up to date, NoodleQuest hadn’t gotten a significant update since 2000 (back when HotBot was one of the best things out there).

We’ve completely reworked the tool — including implementing a backend administration tool for it that allows us to keep it updated much more easily. We’re still tweaking it a bit, and we do invite your input if you have any suggestions. Regarding the quality of the advice that NoodleQuest provides — we do also plan on adding a feedback link on the results screen, to allow the user to comment on the relevancy of the results for a particular topic.

Anyway, try it out, and let us know what you think!

A few new features/enhancements were added to NoodleBib today:

Enhancements:

1. Ability to add multiple authors in the MLA Starter version.
2. If user forgets to click the the “Add” button next to the author’s name, name is auto-added into the list upon clicking Insert/Update Citation.
3. Ability to mark multiple entries in the list and copy or delete those entries all at once.
4. Teacher’s view of shared lists has been changed so that only the lists associated with one class name are displayed at a time (groups of lists can be expanded or collapsed by clicking the “+” or “-” button next to the class name).

Features:

1. Labels (or “tags”): This beta feature is currently turned off by default (see “customization” feature below for information about how to turn it on). The purpose of a “label” is to allow you to manipulate your source list in different ways. For example, you can choose to view only citations that have a certain label (e.g., “show me all of my primary sources”), or you can sort your list with the labels assigned from a certain label category (e.g. “group my citations by source classification: primary, secondary, and tertiary sources”).

   You may (optionally) apply one or more labels to any citation that you write. Labels are organized into label categories. For example, the “source classification” category contains three labels: primary, secondary, and tertiary sources.

2. NoodleBib Customization: The NoodleBib account administrator may log in to the subscription management area and click the new “NoodleBib Customization” link to customize certain features and defaults in NoodleBib. For now, this is limited to turning the “label” feature on or off and selecting a default list style (MLA Advanced/Starter or APA Advanced). Additional options will be added here as needed/requested.

Payments for group subscriptions (i.e., teachers, schools, districts, etc.) may now be made by credit card. The credit card payment authorization form can be found at:

http://www.noodletools.com/paycc.pdf

The “user management” section of the subscription management area (accessible to the NoodleTools account administrator) has been improved. In addition to being able to search for version 6 personal folders by various criteria, you can now also:

• list all existing NoodleBib version 5 personal folders that have not yet been converted to version 6 via the “Open an existing NoodleBib 5 personal folder” link on the main login screen.
• edit the personal ID, password, phone, and folder type (student/library patron or teacher/librarian) for any version 6 folder.