Library Tech Talk

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 University of Michigan Library has received a CLIR grant to provide specialized access to Islamic manuscripts. Users of the site will be able to contribute to the description/cataloging of each item. We are digitizing 1250 manuscripts as part of this project, and I thought it would be worthwhile to share the following summary of the process.

A major milestone for the HathiTrust partners was reached on April 27, 2009 as we released a temporary beta catalog for the digital library, offering bibliographic search (title, author, subject, ISBN, publisher, and year of publication) and faceted browse of all items in HathiTrust. The catalog is built using the open source VuFind software and is temporary, pending the release of permanent catalog to be built by OCLC in conjunction with a HathiTrust partner team.

The Creative Commons blog has a great interview with Molly Kleinman, our Copyright Specialist.

The launch of HathiTrust was #4 on Library Journal Academic Newswire's list of Top Ten Stories for 2008.

We've made some changes to the University of Michigan OAI data provider. The data provider now reflects the fact that we are providing records from the HathiTrust Digital Library (http://www.hathitrust.org/), formerly called MBooks.

I've been researching mobile interface design for a few months now so when we got an email yesterday from a user asking if we'd consider making an iPhone interface for her favorite collection, I jumped at the opportunity. The collection she was interested in (the Bible: Revised Standard Version) is one of our oldest "legacy" collections.

A recent blog pointed out that search is hard when there are many indexes to search because results must be combined. Search is hard for us in DLPS for a different reason. Our problem is the size of the data. The Library has been receiving page images and OCR from Google for a while now. The number of OCR'd volumes has passed the 2 million mark. This raises the question of whether it is possible to provide a useful full text search of the OCR for 2 million volumes. Or more. We are trying to find out.

Since the earliest days of MBooks, DLPS has been looking forward to ingesting our previously-digitized page image volumes into the repository. Though it has taken longer than we had hoped, the Historical Math Collection is now available through the HathiTrust Collection Builder interface.

Immediately after the HathiTrust announcement, one blog said that we'd built the digital library but forgot the front door. Why? Because there was no search functionality included in the initial release. Large scale search has always been a goal and we now have the first attempt at meeting that goal.