Library Blogs

We have been making improvements to our OAI provider (UMProvider). We host the metadata for HathiTrust public domain texts through the provider, as well as all the metadata for text and image collections in the UM Digital Library.

Our first improvement was to make it faster to harvest. Our provider uses mySQL tables to store, sort and provide access to the metadata. Our method for sorting the data was one of the causes for the slowness of the harvesting.

Our second improvement comes from our investigation into the increasing number of deleted HathiTrust records that were showing up in the provider, and a discrepancy between the number of records in the provider and the number of records in our HathiTrust databases. We have not fully determined the cause of this, but we have been able to restore over 30,000 HathiTrust records that were marked as deleted in the provider.

Consequently, we recommend you harvest the provider from scratch, whether the entire metadata set or a particular set. It will be quick, and you'll get those missed records. We will keep you posted on further improvements.

(The UMProvider can be accessed via http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc. There is useful information about the HathiTrust records in the provider at http://www.hathitrust.org/data.)

There are now instructions for using the library's Proxy Server Bookmarklet with an iPhone.

Here's the poster for our upcoming Racing Tournament. The poster is by Stephanie Grimm, one of our grad students.

We are getting ready to run our first gaming tournament in the archive! This will be a silent tournament, meaning that instead of several hours of head-to-head competition, the competitors will have to prove their mettle on five different racing games by scoring the best times. The races can be done during any of the designated times over the course of a week.

Fall semester begins on Tuesday, and so do the fall hours in the CVGA. Yes, by popular demand, we are adding hours on Saturday.We are also planning our first tournament in the CVGA, for sometime late September or early October. Stay tuned for details soon...

Bad news and good news: The bad news is that the archive will be closed all next week, due to the intersession. Regular summer hours will resume the week of August 31, though we'll of course be closed on Labor Day.The good news is that starting September 8 not only will we expand our daily hours to 10am - 9pm, we'll also be adding Saturday hours of 3pm to 9pm.

Over the course of the summer, various camp groups from here at U-M have made use of the video game archive for their campers, including Camp CAEN and GISE (Girls in Science and Engineering) Summer Day Camp.

The University of Michigan Library launched its new web site today. The new site marks a significant change from the old. More than two years in the making, the new site has been vetted through extensive user testing and a four-month beta period. Our goal was to improve access to the information resources the University Library provides through its 19 physical locations, hundreds of databases and research guides, and thousands of online journals.

The University of Michigan Library has received a CLIR grant to provide specialized access to Islamic manuscripts. Users of the site will be able to contribute to the description/cataloging of each item. We are digitizing 1250 manuscripts as part of this project, and I thought it would be worthwhile to share the following summary of the process.

From the July 2009 issue of Scientific American: “A pernicious excitement to learn and play [this game] has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should we regret this? It may be asked. We answer, [this game] is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body..."