Library Tech Talk

The Proxy Server Bookmarklet (originally released in September 2009, and described in the post titled Proxy Server Bookmarklet for iPhone) has been updated to include instructions for using it on an iPad, as well as on an iPod Touch or iPhone. Installation is now a bit simpler than it was since the iPhone/iPad/iPod Touch now allow copying and pasting.

Post by Eric Maslowski. If you’ve ever wanted to view and share some of the most rare and beautiful items in the Library’s collection, the PictureIt Rare Book Reader is your tool. The PictureIt site allows you to "turn the pages" of digitized rare materials on the web.

Post by Maria Bonn. On Wednesday, the Scholarly Publishing Office activated more than 225,000 "buy a reprint" links in HathiTrust, increasing the number of public domain reprints available for purchase by more than 300%.

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.