Library Tech Talk

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.

In November 2108, I was fortunate enough to travel to Fudan University (Shanghai, China) to be a “Foreign Expert” at their library.

Web accessibility is a key ingredient to successful product development that can make or break many peoples’ experience. The U-M Library Digital Accessibility Team (DAT) helps library teams 'bake in' web accessibility from the beginning of their projects and helps coordinate accessibility work across the Library. Read about DAT's services and how collaboration with teams and staff across the library has led to improved products and services for our Library staff, faculty and students.

Paul Schaffner gives an introduction to batch editing metadata using tools that have worked well for him as part of his role in the Text Creation Unit (TCU) within the University of Michigan Library's Digital Content and Collections Department. The instructions and guidance provided, while originally aimed at cataloguers, can be utilized by anyone by following along with Paul's instructions and referring to the suggested resources and links within the article.

Over the past 20 years, the University of Michigan Library has led the way on creating digital collections and establishing best practices around digital preservation that have become benchmark standards for other libraries. However, as our web presence expanded, it became increasingly difficult to adapt it at scale, keep pace with the changing needs of research, and create cohesion between a growing number of applications, sites, and services. It eventually became clear that a new model for web governance was needed. In this post, learn about the library’s history around its web governance and what led us to establish a new committee to create a vision and strategy for our web presence. You’ll also read about some of the committee’s accomplishments so far and learn how the committee’s members are supporting the recently launched Library Search application and the ongoing website redesign.

As an intern in Digital Content and Collections (DCC), I have been working with various older digital collections and projects, to address any issues that have come up since their creation. Each of these collections is unique in content and format, with digitization, description, and access processes designed within the context of grants, stakeholder goals, user needs, and technical capacity. Most recently, I completed a project to ensure access to digitized materials from the Superiorland Library Cooperative (SLC) and through this project learned several lessons that are useful for me -- and anyone else working with older digitized materials -- to keep in mind for future projects with digital collections.

On October 21, 2018, the U-M Library launched a new version of the Online Exhibits site. Our exhibits run on the Omeka platform (classic version 2.6.1), a free, open-source content management system for online digital collections.

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.

On most Fridays I engage in an ongoing experiment in virtual pairing using test driven development (TDD).

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.