Library Tech Talk

Our link resolver at the University of Michigan Library is branded as MGet It. Its purpose is to provide a pathway to online articles and other electronic resources. On October 17th, we replaced the now old link resolver with a custom redesigned solution created using Umlaut, an open-sourced link resolver or “item service provider for libraries.”

In March 2015, Michigan Publishing was awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a project entitled “Building a Hosted Platform for Managing Monographic Source Materials.” In a nutshell, Fulcrum, as the platform is now called, is about building an online platform using the Hydra/Fedora framework to publish media-rich scholarship.

The core team consists of a project lead, project manager, data librarian, UI/UX specialist and three developers.

Below is one of our stories, boldly told through the lens of the project manager. No developers were seriously harmed in the writing of this post.

For three years the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) has been assembling a vast online library to document "the full range of human experience." By reaching out to libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies throughout the United States, the DPLA has gathered metadata from a vast number of digital collections online, including photographs, books, manuscripts, moving images, and audio recordings. Despite having a staff of fewer than twenty people, the DPLA now provides access to over fourteen million records.

The University of Michigan Library pledges to update its major websites to use secure (HTTPS) connections between the servers and web browsers by December 2016.

DCU has a new, A1-sized V-cradle scanner for digitizing tightly bound books. This post examines the need, research, and choice of scanner we purchased.

The University of Michigan Library replaces roughly 1/4 of our computers every year. It is a long and complicated process when one considers the number of library staff and the number of computers (both in office and public areas where staff machines are used) involved.

This year we use a locally developed tool to streamline the process.

Everyone who works in the library, including some student workers, uses the intranet -- that’s over 450 people! In preparation for a major Drupal update and intranet redesign, the Intranet Upgrade Investigation Team (IUIT) has done a ton of thoughtful user research to guide our work including a survey, open card sort and closed cart sort. The findings are informing our progress and helping meet the goal of making the intranet a sustainable and user friendly tool that everyone wants to use.

How does a library present the right information to patrons at the right time and place in the face of changing services, new technologies and vendors? User Journeys provide a way to create and improve what information, services and tools will help users on their path to the resources and services they seek. Find out what insights our team gained from developing User Journeys and we'll tell you about tools, resources and templates you can use to make your own!

Operations staff and LIT’s LTIG (Learning Technologies Incubation Group) started work in April 2015 to define and build a Drupal-based Course Reserves request and processing system. Operations staff at Shapiro Undergraduate, Fine Arts, Music, Art, Architecture & Engineering, and Taubman libraries recently started using the new tool to capture and manage Course Reserves requests from faculty.

This post is a brief overview of the process in designing for large web-based systems. This includes understanding what makes up an interface and how to start fresh to create a good foundation that won't be regrettable later.