Posts by Ken Varnum

The University Library’s digital collections, encompassing more than 300 collections with over a million items, are now discoverable through the library’s Articles discovery tool, powered by Summon. Read on to learn about searching this trove of images and text, and how to add it to your library’s Summon instance.

U-M Library Search launched in late July 2018, combining Mirlyn, ArticlesPlus, and Search Tools into a single discovery interface. Over the past academic year, much work has gone into providing functionality available in the previous interfaces, resolving bugs, and improving the overall user experience.

Not everything a library wants to know is available via web-scale analytics tools such as Google Analytics. Often, custom instrumentation and logging are the best way to answer usability and analytics questions, and can offer better protections for patron privacy as well.

The new University of Michigan Library Search interface, the discovery interface for library resources at the U-M Library, was launched on July 30, 2018.

How the University of Michigan Library is unifying the user experience of discovery across multiple kinds of information, from the catalog to licensed content, from subject expertise to library webpages and LibGuides.

Over Fall 2016, the University of Michigan Library updated most of its web sites to operate exclusively on a secure, HTTPS, protocol. Along the way, we learned a few lessons.

The University of Michigan Library pledges to update its major websites to use secure (HTTPS) connections between the servers and web browsers by December 2016.

Does adding links to popular databases change user searching behavior? An October 2013 change to the University of Michigan Library’s front page gave us the opportunity to conduct an empirical study and shows that user behavior has changed since the new front page design was launched.

More than 15% of user searches for the seven most commonly used databases on the University of Michigan Library’s website were misspellings of the database name. We looked through our search logs for the three months spanning January 1-April 2, 2014, to find correct and likely incorrect search queries.

The University Library has a new blogging platform to which most U-M Library blogs will gradually move over the coming months. The new blogging platform (on which this post was published!) is built in Drupal with an accessible, responsive design. It is designed to bring together the library’s many blogs into one convenient location.