EasyBib or NoodleTools

The Ravenscroft Researcher isn’t the only product to help you cite your paper. Our library has new online resources to help you write citations in MLA format. With these products, you’ll need to create an account while you’re on campus, but then you can access it anywhere, it will hold your data safely! We started out with EasyBib, and wow, is it easy! You can type in ISBN numbers, book titles and authors, or cut and paste from a library database when a citation is provided for you. It saves all of your work so you can print it out, already alphabetized and with a hanging indent when you’re done with the whole paper. They even have an EasyBib App for your iPhone, you can scan and email citations as needed. In fact, this has easily been one of the most exciting new products that I’ve shared with students. They were sitting in class downloading the app and clicking on all of the books they could find, just to see the citation!

NoodleTools started out as NoodleBib, but it has tools, lots of them. Yes, you can cite your work, but it’s more indepth. In order to learn all of the steps, you have to go through each step for each book. No shortcuts, no cutting and pasting. And that has been rough for the Composition students who had been using EasyBib, and are now doing NoodleTools.

Why, then? Well, NoodleTools has this awesome notecard and paper organization feature. EasyBib has this too, but doesn’t allow collaboration. NoodleTools allows your teacher to access your notecards and outlines as you work on your paper, comments will pop up in your dashboard, it’s a very smart program! The collaboration part is why we’re using NoodleTools in our Composition classes, for the paperless and timely dialogue between teacher and student.

So, if you want to learn how to cite correctly, maybe for the first paper of the year, use NoodleTools. EasyBib will make it easy to do afterwards, organizing your scanned or entered information into a beautiful Works Cited. Both integrate smoothly with Google Docs, making your paper complete and beautiful.

Ask any of our Librarians for more information on how to get started with your classes using these or any other resources!