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Library Tech Talk

Technology and project updates from U-M Library Information Technology.
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Posts in Library Tech Talk

Showing 21 - 30 of 134 items
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  • Ken Varnum
U-M Library Search is Live
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.
A pair of snow covered trees against the background of a green aurora sky.
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  • Greg Kostin
Pairing-with-Greg Fridays: Experiments in Paired Software Development
On most Fridays I engage in an ongoing experiment in virtual pairing using test driven development (TDD).
New Search Interface
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  • Ken Varnum
Unifying the Library Discovery Experience
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.
Image of many colored pencils
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  • Bill Dueber
Starting the Conversation with the LIT Tech Diversity Reading Club
In line with the University of Michigan Library's strategic plan to support diversity, individuals in the Library Information Technology division started a Diversity Reading Club where colleagues can come together to lean and discuss readings on the subject. The Reading Club has been going for over a year and a half, and we discuss what it is and why we think it works.
A graph of organization nodes and edges depicting the United States Federal bureaucracy.
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  • Joshua Steverman
Problems with Authority
MARC Authority records can be used to create a map of the Federal Government that will help with collection development and analysis. Unfortunately, MARC is not designed for this purpose, so we have to find ways to work around the MARC format's limitations.
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  • Eliot Scott
Software contributions reduce our debt
Contributing to software projects can be harder and more time consuming than coding customized solutions. But over the long term, writing generalized solutions that can be used and contributed to by developers from around the world reduces our dependence on ourselves and our organizational resources, thus drastically reducing our technical debt.
Work desk covered in different audio media formats
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  • Larry Wentzel
Sounded to bits: Digital preservation of U-M Library’s audio collections
The Audio/Moving Image Team has been digitizing audio since 2009. Read more to find out why, how, what we've done, what we're going to do, and what others are doing!
black and white photo of a chicken and her chicks crossing a dirt road
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  • Katherine Marie Kosinski
The Joy of Insights: How to harness qualitative data in your work
Quantitative data gives you the hard numbers: what, how many times, when, generally who, and where. Quantitative data also leaves out the biggest and possibly most important factor: why.
green lock icon and text that says https at the start of a URL bar
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  • Ken Varnum
HTTPS Everywhere -- Promise Fulfilled
Over Fall 2016, the University of Michigan Library updated most of its web sites to operate exclusively on a secure, HTTPS, protocol. Along the way, we learned a few lessons.
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  • Kat Hagedorn
Formalizing Accessions from Patrons for HathiTrust: “Hey, would you like this book I've got?”
Over the past several months, Digital Content & Collections has worked on new procedures for handling accessions from patrons for HathiTrust. What happens if no HathiTrust contributing institution has their volume on their shelves, and the volume is a good addition to the HathiTrust corpus? In these cases, U-M Library steps into the breach. We can easily handle a small throughput of these volumes from HathiTrust, and we handle three kinds of accessions: physical, digital and virtual.