Posts by Ken Varnum

A look at how the U-M Library website's search boxes were used during the Fall 2012 semester.

MTagger, the University Library's social bookmarking tool, has been turned off, having been replaced by the new MLibrary Favorites tool.

Over the past months, a team of library staff comprising the MLibrary Favorites Working Group (Albert Bertram, Sigrid Cordell, Jonathan Rothman, Sonu Mishra, and Ken Varnum), together with Bill Dueber from Library Systems, have been working on an improved Favorites tool for the library web site.

Since February 2008, the University Library has offered a service called "MTagger" as a way to allow site visitors to save resources for future use. Usage patterns over the four years that MTagger was part of our web site show a clear preference for "favoriting" items rather than tagging them. In fall 2011, the library launched "Search Tools Favorites," a way for authenticated library web site users to save databases and online journals.

At the University of Michigan library, we are working on a tool to integrate four separate tools (one for each of these kinds of resource: databases, online journals, library catalog records, and article citations). But what should we call such a tool, one that is designed to allow site visitors to save resources into their account for later access?

The Great Wikipedia Protest Blackout of 2012 did not result in any particularly significant increase in site searching at the University of Michigan Library. While traffic was up on January 18, 2012, over the same day the previous week (January 11), the increase was about the same as for the day before and the day after -- reflecting the increasing workload of the academic semester more than any Wikipedia-inspired bump.

Several months ago, the library’s Usability Working Group and User Experience Department completed a review of the way large academic libraries present combined search results on their web site. That review was the first phase in a process to help us revise the way we presented our combined search results with an end goal of deciding whether or not to include results from our article discovery environment in the mix with everything else.

The University of Michigan Library's Web Systems department built a Drupal module for searching Serials Solutions' Summon product using the Summon API.

Ever visited a web page and wanted to find more information, from the academic or popular press, on the same subject? This bookmarklet will automatically search ArticlesPlus for the title of the page you are visiting.

Have you ever wanted to look up a book when you were deep in the heart of the library stacks, riding the bus, or between sets at the gym? We have! The User Experience Department, along with Library Systems, is proud to present Mirlyn Mobile.