Updates: Search by title, third party database uploads!

We launched a fresh round of updates yesterday! Take a look:

Autocite books by title, author, keywords, or ISBN: You no longer need to remember a book’s ISBN number to cite a book - now you can search by its title or any other keyword to find it! We’ve partnered with the OCLC and its library database, WorldCat, and are searching over 60 million books. Take a look at WorldCat, it’s a great way to find where books are in your local libraries.

MLA capitalization: It’s one of the hairier aspects of bibliographical formatting - how do you know what to capitalize and what not to? Now, EasyBib has made that much easier! We automatically lowercase words that should be (prepositions, articles, coordinating conjunctions, etc.), and proper case the rest.

Import third party software and database citations: This has been by far the most requested feature from universities and graduate students. Now, files from any database that exports to EndNote or BibTex (pretty much all of them), or any reference manager that exports to either of those formats (EndNote, Zotero, Refworks), can be imported into EasyBib. This is a premium feature, meaning you’ll need to subscribe to MyBib Pro or School Edition to have access to it.

EasyBib ISBN autocite upgrade

One of the most popular features on EasyBib is our ISBN autocite function that allows Bibbers to automatically cite books simply by entering its assigned 10 or 13 digit ISBN number.

As part of our never ending battle to bring you the best citation management tool around, we’re extremely proud to announce that our ISBN database has just gone through a major upgrade.

Over the past three days we’ve added roughly 2,440,000 titles to our database, bringing the tally to an astonishing 22,450,000 supported ISBN numbers.

ISBN autocite is available free of charge for all EasyBib users. Looking to give back to EasyBib? Help us spread the word! Tell a friend, teacher, anyone that will listen! We truly appreciate all the support.

Keep Bibbin,

The EasyBib Team

EasyBib partners with textbook rental company BookRenter

Although we certainly appreciate the various collegiate “Rites of passage”: battling hordes of students, rotting in endless lines, and emptying your checking account for the semesters required reading was never high on the priority list.

That’s why we’re happy to announce our partnership with BookRenter.com. With a little forward thinking you can easily save over 75% off retail textbook prices.

Why buy when you can rent? With BookRenter you search for your ISBN or book titles, just as you do on EasyBib, select the period you want to rent the book for (month, quarter, semester, etc), and you’re all set.

Right now they’re offering free shipping both ways, and 2-day shipping as low as $6.98. The next time you need textbooks, be sure to check them out. They claim they can save you over $500 a year!

Also, we’d love to hear about your experience with BookRenter, please
shoot us an email and let us know how it went!

Bibbin’ updates: Citation management and IP authentication

Hi everyone,

We’re happy to announce a round of new updates to EasyBib.

Citation management: This has been the most requested feature of EasyBib. Now users can copy citations into different bibliographies, combine lists together, or export specific citations directly to Word or HTML. We have also made it possible to edit citations across multiple lists and view all the references you’ve created from one screen.

IP authentication: When we launched our School Edition product in August, a lot of schools requested that we provide access via IP authentication. Now if a school provides us with their IP ranges, we can provide premium services to their students automatically, without any registration or login necessary. Learn more about School Edition here.

Citation help: Many students often have questions about articles they find online and what specific source types they should use to cite them. We’ve added fields to our Web site and database forms that now help point users in the right direction.

Minor bug fixes: Speed improvements, more robust error reporting, and so on.

Happy New Year everyone!

From our community: Plagiarism awareness videos!

Hope everyone is having a great break. Many of the teachers and librarians that visit our site have suggested that we post materials to help students research and write more effectively.

One of our visitors, a librarian hailing from Northern Kentucky University, passed this link along. Students from NKU’s film department made a number of videos that discuss plagiarism, copyright laws, and intellectual property issues. We think every student should be aware of plagiarism and know how to avoid it.

• NKU’s Plagiarism Awareness Videos
• Copyright basics

As a service that formats citations appropriately, EasyBib encourages everyone to be aware of plagiarism. You can always download our own PDF guides on how to cite sources properly.

Happy holidays and have a great new year everyone!

Holiday giveaway: Win an Ipod touch in seconds with EasyBib’s Facebook competition!

1. Fan us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/easybib
2. On your personal status update, direct a message towards us by writing @easybib and select EasyBib, Free Bibliographic Composer.
3. On the lock icon, next to the share button, be sure to share the message with everyone, so we can see it!
4. Write a message on i) why you love EasyBib ii) how you would spend the holidays with EasyBib or iii) anything creative - holiday or end of the semester related. Even a upload picture! For example, “EasyBib, all I want for Christmas…is you!”
5. Those with the most creative messages can win either an Ipod Touch, Flip Video Camcorder, or a EasyBib premium account

Be sure to have your friends like the status messages so we can gauge what’s popular!

We’ll announce and contact the winners via Facebook.

Updates completed on December 9th, 2AM-7AM Eastern

Hi All,

If you were around this morning you may have noticed some downtime. We were trying to do some backend changes, but the time it was taking started bleeding into the school day.

We’ve re-scheduled the changes to tomorrow, Wednesday December 9th, at 2AM. The site will be down until 7AM, for a total period of five hours.

Update: Updates completed successfully. Total downtime was from 2AM - 7:45AM.

EasyBib on Amazon’s Cloud

We’ve made some changes that we are proud to report. If you were up early this morning you would have noticed that we were down for a few hours of “scheduled maintenance” from 6:30AM to 9AM Eastern.

During that time period, we switched our servers from where they are located (here in NYC) to Amazon’s Web Services cloud. If you’re familiar with that term, you’ll know that there are a significant number of Web startups and services moving in that direction.

If you’re unfamiliar with what I’m referring to, Amazon Web Services is a “cloud computing platform” by Amazon (yes, the books company) that allows Web sites to easily adjust their server infrastructure to meet the needs of their Web traffic.

That means as more people use EasyBib, we can add more servers to keep things speedy. We’ve cut down a process that used to take days: ordering a server, getting it shipped, then installing it - to a few minutes: clicking a button to launch a new server.

There are additional benefits like better data backup, cheaper access to storage, and more, which we like too. We’ll discuss that more in a future post.

Anyway, this is our first day in the Amazon cloud. While things certainly will not always be smooth (Amazon has had it’s fair share of downtime), right now we’re pretty thrilled. If you experience any hiccups let us know.

Shoutouts: CouchDB (thanks Jan for all the debugging/erlang-rewriting help), Rightscale (for the countless support back-and-forth emails), Amazon (for existing and continually innovating), and of course, thanks to all of you bibbers out there, the fuel of our fire.

New updates

Hi everyone,

You may have noticed, but we’ve deployed a couple of minor changes across the site.

New help fields: We’ve placed a help caption next to every field on EasyBib’s citation forms. This way, if you’re confused on any particular source field, you’ll be able to learn more about that item in the help section. The help fields used to be placed at the bottom of our page, but we’ve received a lot of feedback and decided to update the positioning.

New APA 6th Edition reference guides: If you’re a teacher or librarian and like our reference guides, take a look at our newly updated versions!

Best,

The EasyBib Team