Library Blogs

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. This post is the third in a series by Tom Burton-West, one of the HathiTrust developers, who has been working on practical relevance ranking for all the volumes in HathiTrust for a number of years.

Joseph McElroy may be the best postmodern writer you've never heard of. And the U-M Library has many of his patient, ponderous books.

The U-M Library has some great chess books for beginners and enthusiasts.

An undergraduate science experiment gone wrong turns two roommates into enemies in this fast-paced fantasy novel.

We may sound playful by making a skeleton pop out from a book, but for centuries images like this one, as found in the printed page, were a serious warning of the imminence of death. For instance, these frightening illustrations were common in the published works of the seventeenth-century Jesuit preacher Jeremias Drexel.

Datamart was designed to be an option for Library staff to get reports of Aleph catalog data in an easy, self-serve way. But how much are we really using it?

Here is our listed of most frequently played games in the CVGA during the month of November. FIFA dominates the list once again, with Call of Duty and Mario Kart both making a dual presence on the list. The XBOX One is getting ever more popular, mostly amongst the sports and first-person shooter crowd.

All gifts to the library on Giving Blueday help fund our acquisition of John James Audubon's The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, a magnificent collection of 150 hand-colored lithographic plates.

57 new games have been added to the CVGA's iPad.

Does adding links to popular databases change user searching behavior? An October 2013 change to the University of Michigan Library’s front page gave us the opportunity to conduct an empirical study and shows that user behavior has changed since the new front page design was launched.