Library Blogs

I spent the morning resurrecting old non-working SNES cartdiges that had been donated to the archive. This involved opening them up, applying polish & fixer to the contacts, then re-sealing. I went six-for-six in getting the old cartridges working again!

Last week we received a donation of a Commodore 64 (actually a later-model Commodore 64C), including a disk drive, monitor and joysticks. All of which works, and also came with about thirty-five games.

We've made some changes to the University of Michigan OAI data provider. The data provider now reflects the fact that we are providing records from the HathiTrust Digital Library (http://www.hathitrust.org/), formerly called MBooks.

I'd been pretty stoked about Mirror's Edge since first reading about it many months ago, but when I sat down to try to play it I sadly learned that I don't have the chops to effectively manage the controls (I got stuck on an early part of the training!) Yesterday I spent some time in the archive watching a student play Edge. I don't normally get too excited watching someone else play, but Edge was definitely exciting to watch.

I've been researching mobile interface design for a few months now so when we got an email yesterday from a user asking if we'd consider making an iPhone interface for her favorite collection, I jumped at the opportunity. The collection she was interested in (the Bible: Revised Standard Version) is one of our oldest "legacy" collections.

As the semester has come to a close, the Comptuer & Video Game Archive will be closed for the intersession. We will open again at Noon on Monday, January 5.

A recent blog pointed out that search is hard when there are many indexes to search because results must be combined. Search is hard for us in DLPS for a different reason. Our problem is the size of the data. The Library has been receiving page images and OCR from Google for a while now. The number of OCR'd volumes has passed the 2 million mark. This raises the question of whether it is possible to provide a useful full text search of the OCR for 2 million volumes. Or more. We are trying to find out.

The Computer & Video Game Archive is featured in an article in today's Detroit Free Press.

I bought a lot of Intellivision games off of eBay for the archive, which were complete in boxes with instruction booklets and overlays.

We received a donation this week of a TI-99/4A computer along with a case full of games. They all work great (except for the fact that the computer keyboard is missing the 'H' key!).