Posts by Ken Varnum

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.

Our Articles search is now even better. The University of Michigan Library is now using Serials Solutions Summon article discovery tool for the new improved ArticlesPlus tool. Now, when you search the ArticlesPlus tab on the library web site, you are searching across 190 million full-text and citation-only records available to the University of Michigan community through the University of Michigan Library.

When you do a search on the University of Michigan Library's web site, you get not only results from the catalog, web site, online journal and database collections, and more, you also get a librarian who is a subject specialist related to your search term. While the matching is not perfect, it provides a human face on search results.

The Proxy Server Bookmarklet (originally released in September 2009, and described in the post titled Proxy Server Bookmarklet for iPhone) has been updated to include instructions for using it on an iPad, as well as on an iPod Touch or iPhone. Installation is now a bit simpler than it was since the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch now allow copying and pasting.

Post by Eric Maslowski. If you’ve ever wanted to view and share some of the most rare and beautiful items in the Library’s collection, the PictureIt Rare Book Reader is your tool. The PictureIt site allows you to "turn the pages" of digitized rare materials on the web.

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