Library Blogs

Sorry it's been so long between updates. But things have been happening with new archive. The space is coming along nicely. Last week the wiring was completed and the furniture assembled.

There are three ways to find MBooks in Mirlyn, the U-M online catalog.

The Library's Electronic Access Unit expressed an interest in making Mirlyn's list of electronic newspapers easier to browse. I'm happy to say that working with my colleagues in the EA Unit, we have developed a tool to do just this from the Library's website.

Very busy this past week: Ordered lots of stuff: games, consoles, displays, controllers, etc. Should start arriving in the next week or two. Fielded questions from folks in cataloging and acquisitions. We're doing lots of things that fall outside the normal work flow so many decisions have to be made.

Many people have asked us about the languages available in MBooks. In particular, they want to know if Google is providing searchable text for non-Western languages or difficult scripts. Most Western European languages have been available from the beginning of the project, but here are some examples of books in languages that Google has added in the past few years.

Yesterday we received our first item purchased (as opposed to donated) for the gaming archive: A Nintendo Wii. Spent about 30 minutes this afternoon hooking it up to make sure that it all works—it's a rough job, but somebody has to do it!

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.

I've been pretty busy working on the game archive over the past week. Some highlights: Got the collection fund set up and started ordering games. I've ordered over 40 games so far, including games for PS3, Wii, Xbox 360, and Windows. Hopefully we'll have stuff through the acquisitions-cataloging-labeling pipeline in time for fall semester...

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.