April 27, 2022

Hi, 

As you may know, the Modern Language Association (MLA) updated to the 9^th edition of their handbook in April 2021. Today we went live with MLA 9 on Citation Maker* for elementary students! 

Through June 30^th, anyone who prefers to use MLA 8 may still access that version through the link at the top of all MLA elementary templates. The MLA 9 secondary version went live earlier this month. 

MLA 8 introduced the concept of containers, and that is maintained in MLA 9, though we simplified the wording for elementary students. This OSLIS page summarizes what’s new in MLA 9 and/or on Citation Maker, including more robust options for the Video and Social Media templates, the ability to cite text messages, the ability to credit apps such as Hulu or Spotify as a container, and the option to include supplemental information in a citation, for example to identify a source as a transcript. 

Each source template still opens with an explanation, a few example citations, and for most templates, a link to “see more examples.” Those additional citation examples will be available in about a month. The “how-to” pages that are linked on each template have tips for what to enter in the author, title, publisher, and URL fields and how to format that text, and those pages have been updated. 

Thanks a million to Marlene Lee, OSLIS Chair, who volunteered over 300 hours on the total project over the last several months. She and I worked as a team with a coding vendor, and her contribution was invaluable! 

*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. 

Thanks,
Jen

Jen Maurer
School Library Consultant
State Library of Oregon