Library Tech Talk

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?

It’s possible we should have written this blog post years ago, when we first created our workflow for how we shepherd digitization projects through our Digital Library. Well, we were busy creating it, that’s our excuse. Three years later, we’re on our third iteration.

Search is the cornerstone of the library website, and the primary goal of our online presence: to help users find resources and information so that they can do their work.

The University of Michigan Library is working hard to improve the accessibility of all our websites. This brings up a simple question: what does it mean to make a website accessible?

The Readability Test Tool can help web content creators make pages easier to read.

Relevance is a complex concept which reflects aspects of a query, a document, and the user as well as contextual factors. Relevance involves many factors such as the user's preferences, task, stage in their information-seeking, domain knowledge, intent, and the context of a particular search. This post is the third in a series by Tom Burton-West, one of the HathiTrust developers, who has been working on practical relevance ranking for all the volumes in HathiTrust for a number of years.

Datamart was designed to be an option for Library staff to get reports of Aleph catalog data in an easy, self-serve way. But how much are we really using it?