EndNote Style for MLA 7th Edition

I waited through the summer hoping that an EndNote output style for the new MLA style would become available for download from EndNote. I waited a couple of weeks past the date when I actually wanted to install it on campus.

And then I waited a couple more weeks.

And then I set to work making my own.

As it turns out, EndNote may have stalled because the new MLA style requires a field that isn’t built into EndNote yet. Every single bibliographic citation in the new MLA style requires that you note the medium of publication. So “Print” for things published on paper, and “Web” for things published on the web, and so on. (Here’s an overview of the new stuff in this edition.) Well, EndNote doesn’t have a field for people to say what medium they’re looking at when they create a new citation. After much experimentation, I co-opted the “Label” field for this purpose, but I can see why EndNote was reluctant to do that. Labels are really supposed to be used for other things… hopefully things that my lit majors won’t need too much, but we’ll have to see.

Two other annoying things about this field are that there will be no way to populate them automatically with the other bibliographic imports from our databases (there’s just no way the database will know if the researcher ultimately sees a print or web version) and that it’s far, far down the field list in an EndNote record, so there’s a lot of annoying scrolling involved for every citation.

These drawbacks aside, I have a draft style that I’m willing to share (zip file). It’s definitely still a draft, so help with testing and troubleshooting is much appreciated.