Posts by Chris Powell

After the successful launch of our ArcLight finding aids application on April 19, 2023 - and the deprecating of our homegrown Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) finding aids application - we are sharing our reflections on the project with the wider community. This blog post will describe the history of finding aids at the University of Michigan Library and what led us to develop the ArcLight finding aids application, starting in earnest in 2020. We will describe our goals for the project, the organization of the development team, and the modifications that we needed to make to effectively complete the project. We will give an overview of what a finding aids application does, and why we decided to use ArcLight as well as Docker and Kubernetes as our new containerization and hosting solution. We will discuss what was advantageous to us for this project as well as what was particularly challenging, and sum up what we learned from our archives partners and end-users, throughout the project.

Lately I’ve been looking back through the past of the Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) -- in fact, all the way back to the time before DLPS, when we were the Humanities Text Initiative -- to see what, if anything, we’ve learned that will help us as we move forward into a world of Hydra, ArchivesSpace, and collaborative development of repository and digital resource creation tools.

The launch of HathiTrust was #4 on Library Journal Academic Newswire's list of Top Ten Stories for 2008.

Since the earliest days of MBooks, DLPS has been looking forward to ingesting our previously-digitized page image volumes into the repository. Though it has taken longer than we had hoped, the Historical Math Collection is now available through the HathiTrust Collection Builder interface.

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.

Start the new year with a look at some Historical Advice to Undergrads. Covering the period from 1856 to 1941, these guides, handbooks, and (let's be frank) sermons offer advice on scheduling your time, choosing appropriate courses, being popular, and remaining virtuous in the face of the temptations that will surround you on campus.

Three weeks after it was launched, we can say a little bit about MBooks collection builder usage. Right now, there are 47 public collections (more than half were created by LIT staff) and 170 personal collections.

Last month I attended the annual Digital Library Federation spring meeting and David Rumsey, renowned for his collection of historical maps, was one of the keynote speakers. Prompted by David Rumsey’s map ticker and what he said in passing about "moving among the maps" in Second Life, I’ve been brooding about the perceived lack of browsability in the digital library context. How would we "move among the books" in MBooks?