September 8, 2020

Hi, 

As you may know, APA updated to the 7^th edition of their publication manual near the end of 2019. Late last week, we went live with APA 7 on Citation Maker!

For those who are new to OSLIS, Citation Maker is a free and ad-free tool that helps students generate accurate citations in MLA or APA format. The MLA version is available on the elementary and secondary Cite My Sources pages on OSLIS, while APA is only available on secondary.

For this school year, those who prefer to use APA 6 can still access that version through the link at the top of all APA templates. 

With APA 7, we were able to reduce the number of source templates from 26 to 10. The look and layout of APA Citation Maker templates are similar to MLA. Like with MLA, notes and links to OSLIS pages help guide students as they create citations. Those pages can also be accessed directly through the Citation Resources folder, which is available at the bottom of the green Source Type column. 

Each source template opens with instructions, a few example citations, and a link to “see more examples.” The additional citations will be posted in about a month. 

Here’s a list of highlights of what’s new in APA 7. The APA Style blog, especially the References section, may be helpful for library staff and classroom teachers to become familiar with the new rules for citing sources. 

Thanks a million to Marlene Lee, OSLIS Chair, who volunteered nearly 300 hours on this project over the last 6 months. She and I worked as a team with a coding vendor, and her contribution has been invaluable! In 2016 when Marlene helped with the MLA Citation Maker update, I crowned her Queen of MLA. Now I bestow an additional title: Queen of APA! :-) 

If you have questions, please ask. 

Thanks,
Jen

Jennifer Maurer
School Library Consultant
State Library of Oregon