A Tale of Two MLA Bibliographies

Mark Sample, a professor of Contemporary American Literature and New Media Studies in the English Department at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Virginia recently asked his blog readers to weigh in on whether they prefer URLs to be included in MLA bibliographies for websites. A whopping 74% agreed with him that website URLs should be included. (Take the poll).

I agree with Mark that eliminating URLs for articles coming from databases like JSTOR is just fine as long as the journal name, volume and issue number are there. I would also agree that the exclusion of URLs from websites seems misguided when many web sites offer stable, concise permalinks.

I will continue to train our Jr. theme research students to use URLs for websites as one way of distinguishing database materials for "born online" materials. Unfortunately the new MLA format uses "web" as the source whether it's a database or a website. This does not help students who don't recognize the difference.

More ideas on Teaching MLA Citation

I've been investigating the Ning called English Companion which was created as a virtual place for English teachers to meet and help each other. One of the threads talked about teaching MLA citations. It provides several ideas of how to actively demonstrate this to students. I particularly liked Mark Childs' suggestions and his conclusion that "essentially, I find that making the students be a reader of the works cited page makes them a better writer of one." Something for us to explore next year.

Noodle Tools Update at end of July

Looks like we'll start the new school year with teaching the MLA 7th ed. updates as Noodle Tools will be incorporating those changes at the end of July.

The following updates are scheduled for 7/31 - 8/2/09 (exact date/time TBD):

1. MLA 7th ed. update
2. Chicago/Turabian legal citation forms
3. Notecards update --see the Noodle Tools blog to view dramatic changes in the Notecards feature. Looks pretty slick and more student friendly. I think they will like the outline feature and the ability to "populate" the outline by dragging notecards.