November 3, 2016

Hi Folks,

I wanted to share some news and resources about MLA 8 and Citation Maker. If this is the first you are hearing about the Modern Language Association’s update to the 8^th edition of the MLA Handbook and how that affect Citation Maker on OSLIS, you may want to browse the OSLIST archive on OSLIS for prior announcements.

Secondary MLA Citation Maker
You may have noticed, but the 4 templates for secondary MLA Citation Maker that were not complete when we went live with the MLA 8 updates in late September have been available since last week. Those templates are Personal Interview, Live Performance, E-Mail, and Social Media. That means all templates on secondary MLA Citation Maker are complete.

Elementary MLA Citation Maker
We are scheduled to update elementary MLA Citation Maker to MLA 8 in the early hours of November 14^th. We’ve asked our vendor if they expect to meet that deadline, and they said yes. If they fall behind, we will change the date in the red note at the top of the current templates.

Access to MLA 7
Currently, the red note at the top of secondary MLA Citation Maker indicates that access to MLA 7 will end in mid-November. That’s because the link in that note opens the elementary version of MLA Citation Maker, which is still based on MLA 7 until November 14^th. As part of updating the elementary version to MLA 8, the vendor will add a link for access to the MLA 7 instance of Citation Maker for the remainder of this school year. Users will be able to access MLA 7 from both the elementary and secondary versions of Citation Maker. We asked for this option based on feedback from users, and the vendor is working on it now. How will you know it’s ready? The red note at the top of the templates will indicate that MLA 7 is available until July 1, 2017. Also, I’ll try to remember to announce it.

MLA 8 Resources
When you’re in Citation Maker, be sure to click on Citation Resources at the bottom of the Source Type column. It leads to a folder on OSLIS (elementary, secondary) that contains citation worksheets and examples, a sample works cited page, and information about how to credit authors and publishers and how to capitalize and punctuate titles. For the secondary version, there is also a link to an MLA 8 introductory video from Marquette University Libraries and a link to pages of labeled citation examples from Valencia College Libraries. Here’s a labeled example for a journal article found in database. For the labeled examples, please remember that MLA 8 allows for a lot of flexibility, and a couple of Valencia’s examples may not match how Citation Maker works. If anyone runs across similar resources that would be appropriate for upper elementary students, please let me know.

Questions? Please ask.

Thanks,
Jen

Jennifer Maurer
School Library Consultant
Oregon State Library