Library Blogs

The new University of Michigan Library Search interface, the discovery interface for library resources at the U-M Library, was launched on July 30, 2018.

On most Fridays I engage in an ongoing experiment in virtual pairing using test driven development (TDD).

How the University of Michigan Library is unifying the user experience of discovery across multiple kinds of information, from the catalog to licensed content, from subject expertise to library webpages and LibGuides.

In line with the University of Michigan Library's strategic plan to support diversity, individuals in the Library Information Technology division started a Diversity Reading Club where colleagues can come together to lean and discuss readings on the subject. The Reading Club has been going for over a year and a half, and we discuss what it is and why we think it works.

MARC Authority records can be used to create a map of the Federal Government that will help with collection development and analysis. Unfortunately, MARC is not designed for this purpose, so we have to find ways to work around the MARC format's limitations.

Contributing to software projects can be harder and more time consuming than coding customized solutions. But over the long term, writing generalized solutions that can be used and contributed to by developers from around the world reduces our dependence on ourselves and our organizational resources, thus drastically reducing our technical debt.

The Audio/Moving Image Team has been digitizing audio since 2009. Read more to find out why, how, what we've done, what we're going to do, and what others are doing!

Quantitative data gives you the hard numbers: what, how many times, when, generally who, and where. Quantitative data also leaves out the biggest and possibly most important factor: why.

Over Fall 2016, the University of Michigan Library updated most of its web sites to operate exclusively on a secure, HTTPS, protocol. Along the way, we learned a few lessons.

Over the past several months, Digital Content & Collections has worked on new procedures for handling accessions from patrons for HathiTrust. What happens if no HathiTrust contributing institution has their volume on their shelves, and the volume is a good addition to the HathiTrust corpus? In these cases, U-M Library steps into the breach. We can easily handle a small throughput of these volumes from HathiTrust, and we handle three kinds of accessions: physical, digital and virtual.