October 1, 2021

¡Hola! Privyet! Xin chào! Hello! 

For just over 20 years, the State Library has partnered with the Oregon Association of School Libraries to offer the Oregon School Library Information System, more commonly referred to as OSLIS. The main purpose of the website is to help upper elementary through high school students learn how to do research. It also offers Citation Maker, a tool for creating citations in MLA and APA formats, and it serves as the central access point for the K-12 databases available from the State Library. 

Now, as part of a recent update, OSLIS includes a translation tool at the top of every page. Though the translation tool is easy to use, I created a document to explain the steps. You are welcome to share the document with staff or students. Please note that when translating Citation Maker pages, the page layout may change depending on the screen size of the device being used, but Citation Maker will still produce correct citations. I will work with the coding vendor to see if we can prevent that layout change. Also, citations produced when using the translation tool will include text in the selected language. To change that, click on Show Original at the top left of the page, and any translated text in the citation will revert to English. There’s a tip about that in the help document. 

Nearly 1 out of every 10 Oregon public school students has a language of origin other than English (Oregon Department of Education, p. 9), so this new tool should help more students learn to research and research to learn! Gracias / spasibo / cảm ơn / thank you to Marlene Lee, OSLIS Chair, who dedicated many volunteer hours helping with the OSLIS update. Thanks, as well, to the Institute of Museum and Library Services and its Library Services and Technology Act grant program for making projects like OSLIS possible.    

Thanks,
Jen

Jen Maurer
School Library Consultant
State Library of Oregon