Library Blogs

Immediately after the HathiTrust announcement, one blog said that we'd built the digital library but forgot the front door. Why? Because there was no search functionality included in the initial release. Large scale search has always been a goal and we now have the first attempt at meeting that goal.

Oh the joys of running a usable archive! Some of the technical difficulties we've run into over the last couple of weeks.

I'm taking a rare stint right now as the monitor in the Game Archive (typically it is staffed by student workers).

Search is a hard problem. I take it for granted because I have things like Google and Lucene available to me. But it is a difficult problem, and it's made more difficult when you're not actually allowed to go around and index everything you want to search. Furthermore this difficulty is compounded when you want to repeat this search in multiple locations, and then combine the results.

The first casualty of our video game archive was our Atari Flashback 2. It just up and stopped working one day a couple of weeks ago. I plan to purchase a replacement, but first I figured I'd put my long-neglected electrical engineering degree to use to see if I could find something obviously wrong (like perhaps a loose wire connection). I didn't find anything, but did snap some photos of the insides.

A couple of weeks ago, the fine folks at the Computer Aided Engineering Network (CAEN) gave us a Battlezone mini-cabinet for the archive. As you can see, it fit in just perfectly near the back door!

The proxy bookmarklet lets you reload a web page through the U-M Library's proxy server. If the page you are visiting is one that the library has a subscription for, and you're presently off-campus, then you should get immediate access to the resource once you've logged in with your uniqname and Kerberos password and have been verified to have a valid library account.

We've expanded our preview hours in the Gaming Archive to Mon - Fri, Noon - 8pm.We've also set our Grand Opening date for Monday, November 17; there will be an event from 3:30 - 6pm that day, with remarks at 4:15.

At the blog Snack or Die, Jocelyn shows how to make cookies (and other desserts) designed after your favorite video game characters. It's yummy fun!

Despite our having done hardly any publicity, the student newspaper, The Michigan Daily, found out about the video game archive and sent a reporter to do a story: "Library opens video game archive."