Easy Bibliographies For Students with OttoBib

It seems nary an English class goes by that we don't have to do major battle with our students to include a bibliography - a proper bibliography. One of the major difficulties is getting students to cite works in a standard style. OttoBib is a simple web tool that students can easily use to create bibliographies. No sign in or registration is necessary. The main page has a simple entry box and all you have to do is enter the ISBN(s) of the books you want to cite. You don't have to enter dashes, and if you are entering more than one just separate them with a coma. Best of all, you can choose the citation style you want (MLA, APA, BibTeX, etc.).

When I checked it out, I entered the ISBN's for several books by Ernest Hemingway. You can see my entry below:

I selected the MLA format (the standard), clicked Get Citations and here was my very fast result:

It also creates a permanent url (at the bottom of my result page) that can be bookmarked or jotted down if you want to save it for later.

Why didn't they have this when I was in college???