The America Psychological Association has just admitted that the newly published 6th edition of their APA Publication Manual contained a large number of errors, including inaccurate citation examples (for more information, including how to acquire a corrected copy, please visit http://apastyle.apa.org/manual/corrections-faqs.aspx). It's important that you know this if you are using the new manual to cite your references. I'd like to stress that BibMe is technically not affected by these errors, as we have not yet implemented or begun to implement the rules/guidelines for APA 6. We are still following APA 5, but we will begin the process of updating to APA 6 once we have our copy of the style manual replaced. Updates on our progress will be posted periodically here on our blog. ...

We on the BibMe team are very appreciative of the support our users have given us. Many of you have made donations, spread the word about BibMe, and recommended it to your educational peers. We're hoping you continue to do so, but in case you needed a little convincing, we're giving you a little more incentive. Today, we're proud to announce "BibMe's Great Textbook Giveaway"! We're giving someone the chance to win $500 worth of textbooks for the spring semester of 2010. And here's how... We're holding a contest to see who can market BibMe in the most creative, effective way. Come up with a novel idea on how to spread the word about BibMe, and then make that idea happen. We're leaving the rest up to you. Go all out - hire a skywriter! Rig up a bat signal with the BibMe logo! Feel free to go viral, or make use of any number of social networking/media websites, too, if you'd like. If you have a lot of Facebook friends or Twitter followers, using them as your target audience may be a smart place to start. You may be able to target people better near your school, particularly around finals week near the end of fall semester. But you are in no way limited to stay on campus - go wherever your idea takes you! Please email your submission to textbooks@bibme.org. Include your name, school, a description of your idea and why you think it was effective,  along with pictures and/or video to show it in action. We will share submissions on our blog as we get them. Submissions must be made by Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 11:59 PM ET. The four members of the BibMe team will judge all entries on originality, creativity, and effectiveness. A winner will be announced on Sunday, January 3, 2010 and will be contacted with details on how to claim their $500 credit towards their textbooks for the semester. By making a submission for the contest, you:

1. Give BibMe permission to publish your submission on our website, including but not limited to your name, a description of your idea, and any submitted photos/videos.
2. Agree that you accept all responsibility for any marketing efforts you make and that you do not hold BibMe responsible in any way.
3. Agree to make any marketing efforts tasteful and appropriate, and that any marketing efforts will not diminish BibMe's brand or reputation.

We're proud to announce that we've finally updated BibMe with the MLA 7th edition guidelines. It's taken us a greater part of 6 months and we've added a lot of new stuff in the process. So what exactly did we update? Here's what's new:

• MLA 7 guidelines  - you may notice  lots of changes to your citations for MLA. First, titles are no longer underlined and instead are italicized. Secondly, citations now display the medium in which they originated (e.g. Print, Web).  If you omit certain pieces of information, like publisher or pages, an abbreviation will be inserted in their place (n.p., n. pag.). Although the new MLA guidelines no longer require URLs in your citations, we have not removed them from your website citations, as we understand their importance to a lot of our users. There lots of other changes, but they are too long to list here. Which leads me to our next big change...
• Revamped Citation Guide page - you can now review specific guidelines and citing situations for each source type for each formatting style. And we give you lots of example citations to guide you. Additionally, we've included Turabian formatting guidelines into the Citation Guide for the first time!  This new design is much more user friendly and conducive to learning in the classroom.
• New form fields and citing possibilities - we've added a bunch of new fields to each source type to expand our citing capabilities...
  • Book - you can select whether you are citing an entire book or just a chapter, and you can now enter a specific edition of the book.
  • Magazine - you can now cite magazines that you found from a database.
  • Newspaper - you can enter the location of the newspaper (city/state/country), indicate if the newspaper is nationally well-known, and cite newspaper that you found from a database.
  • Website - you can now enter a sponsor/publisher and a version number.
  • Film - you can select whether you are citing an entire film or just a chapter/commentary, and you can now indicate whether the film is a re-release.
  • Interview - you can now cite interviews from books, magazines, and magazines.
  • Lecture - you can choose what type of lecture you are citing.
  • Radio/TV - you can choose whether you are citing an episode, a series, or an individual broadcast, as well as if you are citing a transcript of the program.
  • Encyclopedia - you can now choose whether you are citing an encyclopedia or a dictionary, as well as if you are citing a specific article or the entire reference book. You can also indicate whether the encyclopedia is well-known and if entries are alphabetically arranged.
  • Photograph - you can now choose a file type for a self-taken digital photograph, and you can also cite photographs from books, magazines, and newspapers.
• Print-friendly pages - we have gotten a lot of requests to make our pages printable and in response, we've formatted our pages, particularly our Bibliography Maker and Citation Guide pages, to be print out well for users.
• Internet Explorer compatibility - we identified some visual bugs that we're occurring in Internet Explorer and we've fixed a lot of those.
• Various bug fixes - many bugs that you emailed us about have been fixed. Website citations can now be edited properly. ISBN book searches now accept hyphens and still return the proper search results.
• New help topics - we've gotten a lot of emails and questions about certain topics and in response, we've added new questions to our Help & FAQs page.

We've had a lot of people clamoring for the updated MLA 7th edition guidelines - and we're glad to report we're about 1 week away from completing our work on the updates. Along with updating the MLA guidelines for each of the source types we support, we're adding additional form fields to allow for more citing possibilities (like chapters for books, and cities within newspaper names). Perhaps one of the biggest changes that is coming up in our next release is our revamped Citation Guide page. It will give in-depth explanations of lots of citation possibilities, along with plenty of example citations to show you how it's done. Take a look at what to expect: ...

It's been almost 13 months since our last updated, but we've been working hard over that time period to make BibMe a better web application. And we still have a lot to do. Thanks so much for your patience. Take a look around and get yourself acquainted with the changes that have been made. Read all about it below:

• Tooltip help - we've introduced "tooltip help" to BibMe. When entering information about your source into the form fields, hold your cursor over the field label (indicated by blue text and a dotted underline) and you will see a tooltip pop up. This will provide details of the formatting rules and guidelines that are relevant to the source you are citing.
• Citation tagging - you can now tag individual citations, in order to categorize them by subject, author, or any other area of interest. This feature is available on the "My Saved Bibliographies" page. Once you tag citations, you can filter by them and see a list of citations with a specific tag. You can then download this filtered list or save it as a new bibliography!
• Improved "My Bibliography" interface - we've made many changes to the way your in-progress bibliography displays. First, your bibliography is now confined to a specifically-sized section so that large bibliographies don't make the page scroll down infinitely. Second, you can now name and rename your bibliography simply by clicking the pencil icon next to the bibliography title, which we've also added to the interface.
• Photograph support - BibMe now supports citing photographs, pictures, or images found online. Check the dropdown list from the "Other" tab to cite a photograph.
• Annotations - you can now append notes or general information to your citations. These annotations will appear at the bottom of your exported bibliography.
• Calendar interface for entering dates - thanks to a Rails plugin called CalendarDateSelect, you can now use a popup calendar to select and enter date information, instead of filling it in. Click the calendar icon next to any month/day/year fields to use it.
• Expanded Help and FAQ page - in response to common questions and emails we receive, we've added new questions and areas of concern to our Help and FAQ page.
• Design improvements - all across the website, you should notice some visual tweaks and changes. We've standardized the web site design and thrown some polish over everything.
• Magazine search patched - the AutoFill functionality for Magazine is restored, after having to change the way BibMe interfaced with FindArticles.
• Improved Blog page - we finally matched our blog's color scheme to the rest of the website. But we also have provided an RSS feed link so you can subscribe to our blog and be automatically updated about any updates, changes, or new features that we add to BibMe.
• Formatting style updates - we want to thank all of our users who reported any inaccuracies in the style guide's formatting rules. BibMe has since fixed any issues.
• Various bug fixes - many of the visual bugs that persisted have been fixed.

The entire BibMe team would like to take this opportunity to wish everyone a safe, healthy, and enjoyable holiday season! Have a Merry Christmas, Happy Hannukah, a great Kwanza, and a Happy New Year. I know we've been promising everyone an update - believe us, it's almost done! It will absolutely be available in time for spring semester starting after the holidays. But for now, enjoy your winter break! ...