Library Tech Talk

The open source software Hydra is, by its name and nature, modular and complex. Using this technology gives the University of Michigan the opportunity to participate in the development of an increasingly-adopted suite of tools with the flexibility to accommodate a host of needs and engage in the spirit and philosophy of open source software development. With open source, we must concern ourselves not just with our own institution’s needs and priorities, but those of a broader community.

For the past year, the University of Michigan Library IT (LIT) division has been devoting time & resources to conducting a thorough self-assessment. These efforts have included discussions focused on our application infrastructure, our division communication patterns, and our service workflows. And while these discussions were instrumental in helping identify challenges and potential solutions, we wanted to begin to collect hard data to help better understand the complexity of our work.

Over the past few years, the University of Michigan Library has progressively updated and enhanced the way we manage our subject, course, and specialized information guides with Springshare's LibGuides product. This post talks about the various customizations and integrations we've made along the way.

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.