Library Tech Talk

In an upcoming LTT blog post (hopefully, before the end of the calendar year), we will discuss U-M Library's process of enabling page insertions to Google volumes for our HathiTrust Digital Library.

The next version of Mirlyn (mirlyn.lib.umich.edu) is going to take some time to create, but let's take a peek under the hood and see how the next generation of search will work.

In the Fall of 2014, the University of Michigan Library IT unit launched a new initiative called the “Front Door process.” The name resulted from our desire to create a centralized space or “Front Door” through which Library colleagues can submit project requests. With an eye towards increasing transparency, LIT developed this new process with three goals in mind: gather IT project requests into a centralized space, provide a space for a simplified IT project queue or workflow, and have both spaces accessible to everyone in the Library.

Omeka is a content management systems (CMS) that facilitates the creation of online exhibits. Traditionally, exhibit creators needed to have web design skills to create a webpage. Using Omeka, the process for creating exhibits websites is simpler, which allows exhibit creators to easily extend the presence of our physical objects.

If you have heard about linked data, but you're not quite sure what it means, look no further. Find out what linked data is, why it is important and how it will transform the web.

HathiTrust started out with only content digitized by Google, but a goal from early on was to support digitized book material from a variety of sources. One early effort provided a toolkit to partners for preparing content, but which turned out to require more technical effort than was reasonable. We rethought our approach and simplified the requirements for partners while maintaining the same high quality standards for HathiTrust.

This is a re-posting of a HathiTrust blog post. HathiTrust receives well over a hundred inquiries every month about quality problems with page images or OCR text of volumes in HathiTrust. That’s the bad news. The good news is that in most of these cases, there is something they can do about it. A new blog post is intended to shed some light on the thinking and practices about quality in HathiTrust.

How to secure connections regardless of which network the clients are on.

If you really love something you might have to let it go.

Here at the U-M Library, we’re committed to identifying opportunities for engagement between Library staff and students. But identifying these opportunities can be difficult for our Library’s IT unit since we’re not involved with students as part of our day-to-day work. How do we as tech professionals engage with the student community?