Library Tech Talk

MBooks is becoming HathiTrust. See the HathiTrust website for more information. Roy Tennant has already commented.

There are three ways to find MBooks in Mirlyn, the U-M online catalog.

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.

Many people have asked us about the languages available in MBooks. In particular, they want to know if Google is providing searchable text for non-Western languages or difficult scripts. Most Western European languages have been available from the beginning of the project, but here are some examples of books in languages that Google has added in the past few years.

As previously mentioned, the Usability Working Group (UWG), along with our 2 fantastic and hardworking interns, have been conducting usability research on MTagger.

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.

Our recent article in D-Lib Magazine is a follow-up to the McCown et al. article in IEEE Internet Computing two years ago, in which the researchers investigated the percentage of URLs from OAI records in Google, Yahoo and MSN search indexes. We were interested in whether Google in particular had increased the number of OAI-based resources in its search index.

Three weeks after it was launched, we can say a little bit about MBooks collection builder usage. Right now, there are 47 public collections (more than half were created by LIT staff) and 170 personal collections.

As previously mentioned, we've been working on expanding the functionality of our MBooks system. The new interface now allows users to create their own collections of MBooks items and view public collections created by others. Users can also do full text searching across all items within a collection.

Last month I attended the annual Digital Library Federation spring meeting and David Rumsey, renowned for his collection of historical maps, was one of the keynote speakers. Prompted by David Rumsey’s map ticker and what he said in passing about "moving among the maps" in Second Life, I’ve been brooding about the perceived lack of browsability in the digital library context. How would we "move among the books" in MBooks?