NoodleTools' Tough Choice

If you're one of NoodleTools' tens of thousands of daily users, you may be a little ticked off. The once-free Internet site (www.noodletools.com), which teaches students how to create their own bibliographies, has gone the same route as many other popular Web sites—it's now charging users for its services. The bad news came in late March, when visitors discovered they couldn't log on to the site. To make matters worse, it happened when middle, high school, and university students were in the midst of big research projects.

What happened? According to founder Debbie Abilock, the company's Internet Service Provider (ISP), which she declines to name, deliberately shut off her site without warning, claiming NoodleTools—with as many as 400,000 hits a day—was too heavily trafficked and was clogging its bandwidth. Students suddenly had little or no access to the interactive software. "It was very bad timing. We had lots of schools that have been using [the site] a long time," says Abilock, a librarian at California's Nueva School, who runs the site with her 27-year-old programmer son, Damon. "We were shocked about how quickly we were shut down."

Hundreds of e-mail messages claiming, "Where's the site? We need it!" came flooding in. After a day of trying to contact the ISP, the mother and son team decided to fix the problem themselves. Debbie's brother-in-law donated the use of a spare server, and Damon hustled to get the site up and running again. After two weeks, the company resumed full operations on April 1. But there was one major difference—the Abilocks had to start charging for the most heavily used tools on their site, including the bibliography maker. Putting Noodletools on its own server meant the Abilocks would be required to pay hundreds of dollars a month in communications charges, in addition to putting in hundreds of hours to manage and to continue to upgrade the site.

The subscriptions are reasonable; an individual subscription—popular with many university students—costs $4 for three months. The company has an account with PayPal, which enables subscribers to pay by credit card. A teacher pays $10 a month for unlimited access for all her students; a school or library with fewer than 1,000 users pays $200 a year; and a larger school or library pays $300 a year. "We had no intention of charging for the existing tools," says Damon, adding that they simply wanted to help schools.

Beginning next year, the Abilocks plan to offer more comprehensive online tools, like a flexible curriculum mapping program that allows schools to track what individual students are learning. But with Noodletools in financial jeopardy, Damon and Debbie had to ask users to subscribe immediately. About 25 schools subscribed within the first two weeks of resumption, and the Abilocks quickly learned how to handle purchase-order numbers.

Debbie says she's received her share of complaints, but teachers and librarians seem to accept the idea that good resources can't remain free for long. Britannica.com was free for nearly two years, but started charging users for access to many of its resources. "I think this is just the beginning of a change in free Internet that we have come to rely on in the past few years," says Josephine Dervan, a library media specialist at Strathmore Elementary School in Aberdeen, NJ. She says media specialists should start budgeting now for more subscription services as more sites are forced to follow in NoodleTools' footsteps. The alternative, she feels, is to use other sites that won't be as reliable.