Library Tech Talk

I've been researching mobile interface design for a few months now so when we got an email yesterday from a user asking if we'd consider making an iPhone interface for her favorite collection, I jumped at the opportunity. The collection she was interested in (the Bible: Revised Standard Version) is one of our oldest "legacy" collections.

A recent blog pointed out that search is hard when there are many indexes to search because results must be combined. Search is hard for us in DLPS for a different reason. Our problem is the size of the data. The Library has been receiving page images and OCR from Google for a while now. The number of OCR'd volumes has passed the 2 million mark. This raises the question of whether it is possible to provide a useful full text search of the OCR for 2 million volumes. Or more. We are trying to find out.

Since the earliest days of MBooks, DLPS has been looking forward to ingesting our previously-digitized page image volumes into the repository. Though it has taken longer than we had hoped, the Historical Math Collection is now available through the HathiTrust Collection Builder interface.

Immediately after the HathiTrust announcement, one blog said that we'd built the digital library but forgot the front door. Why? Because there was no search functionality included in the initial release. Large scale search has always been a goal and we now have the first attempt at meeting that goal.

Search is a hard problem. I take it for granted because I have things like Google and Lucene available to me. But it is a difficult problem, and it's made more difficult when you're not actually allowed to go around and index everything you want to search. Furthermore this difficulty is compounded when you want to repeat this search in multiple locations, and then combine the results.

The proxy bookmarklet lets you reload a web page through the U-M Library's proxy server. If the page you are visiting is one that the library has a subscription for, and you're presently off-campus, then you should get immediate access to the resource once you've logged in with your uniqname and Kerberos password and have been verified to have a valid library account.

Start the new year with a look at some Historical Advice to Undergrads. Covering the period from 1856 to 1941, these guides, handbooks, and (let's be frank) sermons offer advice on scheduling your time, choosing appropriate courses, being popular, and remaining virtuous in the face of the temptations that will surround you on campus.

MBooks is becoming HathiTrust. See the HathiTrust website for more information. Roy Tennant has already commented.

There are three ways to find MBooks in Mirlyn, the U-M online catalog.

The Library's Electronic Access Unit expressed an interest in making Mirlyn's list of electronic newspapers easier to browse. I'm happy to say that working with my colleagues in the EA Unit, we have developed a tool to do just this from the Library's website.