Library Tech Talk

The library recently completed a successful, six-month pilot program for a new model of web content oversight. Each division appointed a web content coordinator to represent them, and together the coordinators work in library-wide issues.

During the Winter 2014 term, 60 M-STEM Academy students used a Learning Technologies Incubation Group (LTIG)-developed digital badging application to earn awards for competencies acquired outside of the traditional classroom setting.

The University Library has a new blogging platform to which most U-M Library blogs will gradually move over the coming months. The new blogging platform (on which this post was published!) is built in Drupal with an accessible, responsive design. It is designed to bring together the library’s many blogs into one convenient location.

A look at how the U-M Library website's search boxes were used during the Fall 2012 semester.

The Digital Conversion Unit (DCU) recently acquired a new setup that will allow for the digital capture of 3D objects, realia, and ephemera. The new equipment will create museum quality photos of 3D objects to be included in the Library's digital collections.

MTagger, the University Library's social bookmarking tool, has been turned off, having been replaced by the new MLibrary Favorites tool.

Over the past months, a team of library staff comprising the MLibrary Favorites Working Group (Albert Bertram, Sigrid Cordell, Jonathan Rothman, Sonu Mishra, and Ken Varnum), together with Bill Dueber from Library Systems, have been working on an improved Favorites tool for the library web site.

In February, we released the first part of the advanced search interface for HathiTrust full-text search. Today we released the second phase of advanced search. You can now combine up to four different fields connected by the "AND" or "OR" operators, and any limits set are retained if you click on the "Revise this advanced search" on the search results page.

Since February 2008, the University Library has offered a service called "MTagger" as a way to allow site visitors to save resources for future use. Usage patterns over the four years that MTagger was part of our web site show a clear preference for "favoriting" items rather than tagging them. In fall 2011, the library launched "Search Tools Favorites," a way for authenticated library web site users to save databases and online journals.

At the University of Michigan library, we are working on a tool to integrate four separate tools (one for each of these kinds of resource: databases, online journals, library catalog records, and article citations). But what should we call such a tool, one that is designed to allow site visitors to save resources into their account for later access?