Calvin Web Application Creates Bibliographies

December 16, 2004 == MEDIA ADVISORY

A new release from the Teaching and Learning Digital Studio at Calvin College
is making a big impact on campus and beyond.

KnightCite is a seemingly simple tool, but it solves a big problem for a lot
of students. Based on input from the user it generates bibliographic
information for term and research papers. And it does so in any of three
styles chosen by the user - Modern Language Association (MLA), American
Psychological Association (APA) or Chicago Manual of Style.

See http://webapps.calvin.edu/knightcite/

Since being launched this fall with little fanfare or publicity the site has
garnered a steady base of users. In fact in November 2004 some 4,500 unique
visitors made their way to KnightCite to take advantage of its free service.
Users include many Calvin students plus students from a variety of other
colleges, universities and high schools, including Grand Valley State
University and Aquinas College - both of which have links to the site on their
library website pages.

KnightCite was built this summer by Calvin sophomore Justin Searls, a native
of Saline, Michigan. He is a student intern for the Digital Studio at Calvin
and created KnightCite at the request of Calvin digital librarian Greg Sennema
who recognized the importance of developing a tool to enable students to
correctly utilitze the MLA, APA, and Chicago citation formats in their research
papers and other academic endeavors.

Calvin's John Niedzielski supervised the project. He says KnightCite is
clean, intuitive and user friendly.

"Visitors to the site first can click on one of three icons," he says, "either
MLA, APA or Chicago. From there the user simply plugs in the appropriate
information into the forms on the screen, clicks submit and the appropriate
bibliographical entry for the selected style is displayed, ready to be copied
and pasted into the user's paper."

Although KnightCite looks simple, Searls, a computer science and Japanese
major, says creating the tool was a complicated bit of programming - one that
took several hundred hours of his time this summer.

"There are a lot of details with citations," he says, "and so for the code in
KnightCite I had to take into account lots of possibilities."

Indeed Searls notes that KnightCite includes about 12,000 lines of code (it's
written in PHP, a popular internet scripting language).

"There are a lot of 'if' statements in the code," he says with a chuckle.
"But that was the challenge. We wanted to build a site that would take a
complex problem and make it appear simple. I think we accomplished that."

An ever-growing cadre of users around the country would agree.

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Received on Thu Dec 16 13:34:34 2004