We are excited to announce that our new digital document interface is up and running. For the past eight months, staff members from the Clarke Historical Library, the CMU Libraries, and
DL Consulting in New Zealand have been working to convert all of the digitized documents found in the CMU Online Digital Object Repository (CONDOR) to a new interface. This new interface, powered by Veridian collection management software, separates the digital collections found in CONDOR into four broad groups:
The CMU Libraries Digital Collection (
digitalcollections.cmich.edu) gives you access to over 30,000 documents - that's nearly 450,000 digitized pages! If you were used to getting to digital documents by typing "condor.cmich.edu" into your web browser, you can continue to do so and you will be automatically redirected to the new site. While "condor.cmich.edu" will still work, other links will be affected. If you have saved links to specific documents or titles in CONDOR, you will have until the end of December to update them to the new Veridian interface. After December, the links to documents in CONDOR will no longer be available.
We are pleased to bring you this exciting new website. We invite you to
jump in and explore. For users and for staff at the CMU Libraries, there
may be some stumbling blocks with our new setup. Please
let us know if
you are having any trouble, any technical issues, or you have any comments. We will address
them as soon as we can.
Highlights of the New Interface
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| Click on the image for a larger view |
Some of the highlights of the new Veridian interface include the opportunity to customize your experience with several options available at the top of the page (see number 1 in the image above). You can also register your own account, which will allow to save your searches for future reference (number 2). Also, because computers are not perfect when it comes to interpreting typed words on a digital page (called text recognition or optical character recognition), you can correct the errors made by computers when you are registered. Statistics about the number of text corrections made by individual users are logged and displayed on the front page of the Veridian interface via a Text Corrector Leaderboard (number 6).
The Veridian interface also uses a standard library search bar that many users are familiar with in order to do keyword searches of the full text (number 3) or you can select the Advanced Search function to limit by date or title as well. And now, searches for phrases can be wrapped in "quotation marks" to search for that exact phrase. If you are interested in seeing a random document in the holdings, take a look at the random item for the collection (number 4). For the Digital Michigan Newspapers, this random document is actually a newspaper from this day in history. Finally, if you have an idea of a title or date range of interest to you, but you don't want to search for keywords, you can browse the entirety of the collections by date or title (number 5).
When viewing a document, the Veridian interface lays out the pages in order horizontally, allowing you to view the document by scrolling to the right, or virtually turning to the next page. You can also search for a specific keyword within a document and you can view the transcript of the recognized text to the left of the reading pane (which allows you to correct the text if you are registered and logged in).
