Yesterday we described the student’s Dashboard, today we’re going to show you the new Paper feature. Both can be accessed from the NoodleBib navigation bar.

Currently a student can export their notes and a bibliography to a word processor. However, to function efficiently as a platform for research, NoodleBib needed a robust online composing space that a instructor (and collaborating students) could access. Many schools and colleges have told us that they are moving toward cloud computing with Google Docs being the online word processing tool of choice, so we felt confident that integration of Google Docs with NoodleBib would be embraced by our users.

We weren’t satisfied with a simple “Export to Google Docs” button. We’ve done a deeper integration. When a student with a Google account clicks the Paper button, a new document is created in the student’s Google Docs account, one that is automatically tied to the student’s project in NoodleBib. Tighter integration means that the student can return directly to a paper by clicking on the Paper button in the NoodleBib navigation bar or the Paper icon in the “Components” section of the Dashboard.

Even better, when a student shares a NoodleBib project with a teacher, the paper is shared too. The teacher has full access to the document and can use Google’s great new annotation tools to give feedback directly on the student’s working paper:

We’re pleased with our early testing but, as always, we encourage you to share your ideas and comments with us!

This Friday we’ll be doing the first of several NoodleBib software updates this summer. Each day this week we’ll post another blog entry introducing you to the new features.

First a little background…

As many of you know, NoodleBib began in 1999 as a tool to create bibliographies. After years of picky programming and focused, hard work (with lots of advice from the big three style editors and our users) we’re proud of the fact that NoodleBib is the most accurate, comprehensive online tool for creating MLA, APA, and Chicago-style source lists.

In 2006 we expanded our service to include online notecards. With the redesign of the notecards graphical interface and the addition of the outlining feature in the summer of 2009, the online notecards have become an integral part of the research process in thousands of schools. In fact, many schools now subscribe to NoodleBib for the notecards feature, and use the bibliography tool as an added benefit.

NoodleBib is quickly becoming a platform for student research rather than just a “bibliography composer.” As such, the need for a project overview screen (the Dashboard) is clear. Let’s take a look at this new feature:

The Dashboard provides:

• An overview of the project components (Bibliography, Notecards, and the Paper, which we’ll introduce tomorrow)
• A place for the student to write a research question and thesis statement
• Information about the assignment drop boxes and teachers that the project is shared with
• Teacher-selected relevant links (which could be a calendar, an assignment sheet, a pathfinder, blog, wiki, etc.)
• A student-created to-do list to keep track of tasks, assignments and milestones.
• Unified display of the teacher or librarian’s general observations, as well as specific comments linked back to the specific bibliography entry or notecard

Teachers and librarians will also discover that the teacher’s view of the student’s Dashboard is an efficient way to monitor progress and offer feedback.

As with all new features we add, we’ve kept this initial version of the Dashboard as simple as possible, to observe how it is used and to get your feedback. We look forward to your comments and suggestions for how we can make the Dashboard even more useful.

There will be some downtime the evening of Friday, July 23rd, from approximately 9:00-11:00 PM PST. During this time we will be doing the first of several NoodleBib updates planned this summer. We will be revealing details about the improvements and new features on the blog this week, so stay tuned!

Note: These updates are complete as of 11:30 PM PST, 7/23/10.

At 3:00 PM PST today, the NoodleTools.com site went offline. It turns out the cause was a failed switch (a hardware component) at the company that houses our servers. The Web site appears to be back online now (4:30 PM PST). We apologize for the inconvenience, and hopefully they have the issue fixed permanently.

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!

We will be taking the site offline for some server upgrades on Saturday, October 3rd at approximately 10:00 PM CST. The site should be available by 11:00 PM.

We’ll be taking the server offline for up to half and hour at approximately 10:00 PM CST on Monday, September 28th to do some routine maintenance. Please check noodletools.info for status.

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.