Library Tech Talk

Post by Catherine Soehner. It is my pleasure to announce the public debut of PictureIt Rare Book Reader. PictureIt is a web-based animation program that gives users the sensation of turning the pages of digitized rare materials that would be otherwise difficult, if not impossible, to view or obtain. Volume 1 of John James Audubon’s Birds of America was selected as the inaugural PictureIt book.

We have fixed a mistake with the UMProvider (OAI provider) that caused there to be more Dublin Core format records than MARC format records.

The HathiTrust repository has reached the 5 million volume mark!

The Usability Group has been working hard! Our last task force project was to evaluate the recently implemented LibGuides.

For the past two years the University of Michigan Library has been making many of our digitized texts (including items that are in-copyright) available to persons with print disabilities through the HathiTrust Digital Library. Our Dean, Paul Courant, recently posted about this project on his blog so I thought it might be nice to offer more background and some technical information about this project.

We have been making improvements to our OAI provider (UMProvider). We host the metadata for HathiTrust public domain texts through the provider, as well as all the metadata for text and image collections in the UM Digital Library.

Our first improvement was to make it faster to harvest. Our provider uses mySQL tables to store, sort and provide access to the metadata. Our method for sorting the data was one of the causes for the slowness of the harvesting.

Our second improvement comes from our investigation into the increasing number of deleted HathiTrust records that were showing up in the provider, and a discrepancy between the number of records in the provider and the number of records in our HathiTrust databases. We have not fully determined the cause of this, but we have been able to restore over 30,000 HathiTrust records that were marked as deleted in the provider.

Consequently, we recommend you harvest the provider from scratch, whether the entire metadata set or a particular set. It will be quick, and you'll get those missed records. We will keep you posted on further improvements.

(The UMProvider can be accessed via http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/o/oai/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc. There is useful information about the HathiTrust records in the provider at http://www.hathitrust.org/data.)

There are now instructions for using the library's Proxy Server Bookmarklet with an iPhone.

The University of Michigan Library launched its new web site today. The new site marks a significant change from the old. More than two years in the making, the new site has been vetted through extensive user testing and a four-month beta period. Our goal was to improve access to the information resources the University Library provides through its 19 physical locations, hundreds of databases and research guides, and thousands of online journals.

The University of Michigan Library has received a CLIR grant to provide specialized access to Islamic manuscripts. Users of the site will be able to contribute to the description/cataloging of each item. We are digitizing 1250 manuscripts as part of this project, and I thought it would be worthwhile to share the following summary of the process.

A major milestone for the HathiTrust partners was reached on April 27, 2009 as we released a temporary beta catalog for the digital library, offering bibliographic search (title, author, subject, ISBN, publisher, and year of publication) and faceted browse of all items in HathiTrust. The catalog is built using the open source VuFind software and is temporary, pending the release of permanent catalog to be built by OCLC in conjunction with a HathiTrust partner team.