Elizabeth Shalanda Whitmore
Library Blogs
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Reflections on Café Shapiro 2025 from the 2024-2025 U-M Library Engagement Ambassador Team.
LIT’s Design and Discovery department received generous support from an anonymous donor to fund a Library User Experience Research Fellow position. Our first fellow was Suzan Karabakal, a master’s student at the U-M School of Information. She investigated and recommended changes to the way Library Search presents results. Suzan conducted user research to identify specific changes we could make to improve our “Everything” results screen and search results for Catalog and Articles.
Join us next Thursday, 20 March, between 4-6p for our next "Third Thursdays at the Library" event of the semester!
Library Engagement Fellow, V Shin, reflects on the transformations of the Borderless Seed Stories project, and announces upcoming event series, Seeding Dialogue!
March is Women's History month. I created a display in the Shapiro Lobby highlighting books in our collection about and by trans women. To avoid leaving trans men of the conversation, I created this paired blog post with some of the books by and about trans men in our collection.
In 1866, Malinda Russell published "A Domestic Cook Book" in Paw Paw, Michigan. As the oldest known cookbook by an African American woman, this slim volume is a landmark in American culinary history. Join us for a reception and panel discussion celebrating a new edition released by the University of Michigan Press. The reception will begin at 5:15pm, with the conversation to follow at 5:45pm.
In 2024, updates to the Plain Language Medical Dictionary (PLMD) included big improvements for accessibility and user experience, plus adding support for images. We fixed contrast issues, unclear icons, and missing labels to meet WCAG 2.1. Search also got smoother, and instructions are now clearer. In addition, we added image support with JSON updates for URLs and alt text. With our legacy hosting environment shutting down, we moved the PLMD moved to GitHub Pages as part of the project. This provides better stability and automatic updates via GitHub Actions.
Library Student Ambassadors invited students to blindly choose their next read.
Join us next Thursday, 20 February, between 4-6p for our next Third Thursdays at the Library event of the semester!
This blog post explores the challenges faced by novice users of the University of Michigan's Library Search interface, drawing on user research conducted with undergraduate students and librarians. The research aimed to understand how students approach library searches, to identify their pain points, and learn how they navigate the Everything results page. By gaining insights into these areas, the research aimed to identify opportunities for improvement and inform the design of more user-friendly library search tools.