Citation Station

Just wanted to share an image of our “Citation Station,” one of the many ways we are guiding and instructing students as we actively encourage them to find, evaluate and correctly site sources:

We started thinking about March as Woman’s History Month and about the contributions of American artists such as Dorothea Lange. From there, we used her “Migrant Mother” image and identified resources from different places like Gale Virtual Reference Library and Biography in Context, Salem History eBooks, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, books in our collection and relevant web sites. 

We posted each of the sources with a labeled citation as a means for students to compare and contrast their own work.  

Located near to our Junior Theme book carts, this display also provides a readily available way for librarians to quickly provide an example to the students, both for citation format and to illustrate the benefits of exploring a variety of sources.

For more ideas, check out these Pinterest Boards and K-M the Librarian’s blog post, World of Citation, about using world maps which drew attention from Buffy Hamilton and Debbie Abliock. Can’t wait to see the ideas for next year!

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.