Library Tech Talk

You may have noticed that the links to Google Books in Mirlyn have a little more information lately. We have always provided links to online copies in both Google Book Search and MBooks. We're now using the Google API to provide links to any book in Mirlyn that is also in Google Book Search.

Over the past year we've been developing a new collection building tool to be used in conjunction with the MBooks "page-turning" application already available. This tool will allow users to create their own collections of MBooks items and view public collections created by others. Users will also be able to do full text searching across all items within a collection.

The Usability Working Group (UWG), along with our 2 fantastic and hardworking interns, is spending the summer conducting usability research on MTagger. We started by doing a heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough. The goal for these evaluations was to reveal a preliminary set of issues pertaining to the usability, functionality and aesthetics of MTagger and to facilitate prioritizing further benchmarks. This report is now online.

We get questions from MBooks users (most recently from dfulmer in the comments to this post) about how to link to pages, what the URL parameters such as "num" and "seq" mean, and other questions about links and page numbers.

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).

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.

As is well known, we are digitizing all the bound volumes in our library, including books in copyright. I don't want to address the legal issues surrounding the digitization itself, but instead discuss uses of these materials after digitization. We do not show any part of in-copyright books in MBooks, leading people to wonder why we even bother to digitize them. We can answer that question in a number of ways.

Since its launch in late February, MTagger has grown to more than 1250 tags and almost 500 users. MTagger is the U-M Library's tagging tool -- it allows you to save and label library catalog entries, digital images, or any web page so that you can find them again and share them with others.

There is an alternative way to access MBooks other than through UM's online catalog Mirlyn. You can harvest the MBooks records directly via our OAI interface. The University of Chicago has done just that, and integrated these records into their library catalog.