Library Blogs

The Library website is not an archive but it does need curation. This past summer I explored archiving legacy content in Deep Blue.

Relevance is a complex concept which reflects aspects of a query, a document, and the user as well as contextual factors. Relevance involves many factors such as the user's preferences, task, stage in their information-seeking, domain knowledge, intent, and the context of a particular search. Tom Burton-West, one of the HathiTrust developers, has been working on practical relevance ranking for all the volumes in HathiTrust for a number of years.

How much do people actually read on the web? Not much. UX Myths presents the evidence.

More than 15% of user searches for the seven most commonly used databases on the University of Michigan Library’s website were misspellings of the database name. We looked through our search logs for the three months spanning January 1-April 2, 2014, to find correct and likely incorrect search queries.

Looking back, there are a few lessons that most resonated over the course of my first year as the library's web content strategist.

After running for over a decade, BlueStream was retired on June 30th, 2014.

The library recently completed a successful, six-month pilot program for a new model of web content oversight. Each division appointed a web content coordinator to represent them, and together the coordinators work in library-wide issues.

During the Winter 2014 term, 60 M-STEM Academy students used a Learning Technologies Incubation Group (LTIG)-developed digital badging application to earn awards for competencies acquired outside of the traditional classroom setting.

The University Library has a new blogging platform to which most U-M Library blogs will gradually move over the coming months. The new blogging platform (on which this post was published!) is built in Drupal with an accessible, responsive design. It is designed to bring together the library’s many blogs into one convenient location.

A look at how the U-M Library website's search boxes were used during the Fall 2012 semester.