Library Blogs

As previously mentioned, the Usability Working Group (UWG), along with our 2 fantastic and hardworking interns, have been conducting usability research on MTagger.

The University of Michigan Library is in the process of a major site redesign. Part of this design is moving -- at long last -- from static pages built on SSI to a full-blown content management system. We started with a review of the (mostly open source) CMS software landscape, and winnowed this list down to nine candidate systems worth a deeper look.

Our recent article in D-Lib Magazine is a follow-up to the McCown et al. article in IEEE Internet Computing two years ago, in which the researchers investigated the percentage of URLs from OAI records in Google, Yahoo and MSN search indexes. We were interested in whether Google in particular had increased the number of OAI-based resources in its search index.

Three weeks after it was launched, we can say a little bit about MBooks collection builder usage. Right now, there are 47 public collections (more than half were created by LIT staff) and 170 personal collections.

As previously mentioned, we've been working on expanding the functionality of our MBooks system. The new interface now allows users to create their own collections of MBooks items and view public collections created by others. Users can also do full text searching across all items within a collection.