Posts by Ken Varnum

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.

The University of Michigan Library launched its new web site today. The new site marks a significant change from the old. More than two years in the making, the new site has been vetted through extensive user testing and a four-month beta period. Our goal was to improve access to the information resources the University Library provides through its 19 physical locations, hundreds of databases and research guides, and thousands of online journals.

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.

The University of Michigan Library is in the process of a major site redesign. Part of this design is moving -- at long last -- from static pages built on SSI to a full-blown content management system. We started with a review of the (mostly open source) CMS software landscape, and winnowed this list down to nine candidate systems worth a deeper look.

At the University of Michigan Library, in partnership with Google, we have been busily scanning our collections. This opens up lots of possibilities, including an exciting one that launches today: search the full text of a book from within Mirlyn, the library's catalog.

MLibrary Labs is the University Library's test bed and playground. Here's a summary of all the tools that have been released since we launched it in September 2007.