Posts tagged with MLibrary Labs

Search is a hard problem. I take it for granted because I have things like Google and Lucene available to me. But it is a difficult problem, and it's made more difficult when you're not actually allowed to go around and index everything you want to search. Furthermore this difficulty is compounded when you want to repeat this search in multiple locations, and then combine the results.

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 Library's Electronic Access Unit expressed an interest in making Mirlyn's list of electronic newspapers easier to browse. I'm happy to say that working with my colleagues in the EA Unit, we have developed a tool to do just this from the Library's website.

Earlier this week, I had a chance to give a brown-bag session on a new API into our catalog, Mirlyn (Ex Libris's Aleph software).

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.