Michel, Jason
micheljp
Recent Submissions
Item Item "Snow Fall"ing Special Collections & Archives [slide deck]
Ladd, Marcus; Michel, JasonItem “Snow Fall”-ing Special Collections & Archives
Michel, Jason; Ladd, Marcus“Snow Fall” is a Pulitzer Prize winning, digital storytelling project produced by the New York Times. It represents the next step in long-form digital journalism. The web application tells a compelling story about the fate of sixteen skiers and snowboarders during an avalanche. The textual element of the story is wrapped in a slick interface with gently appearing and disappearing images, strategically positioned HTML5 video and image slideshows, maps, and 3-D visualizations. Its title, “Snow Fall,” has become a verb in the digital journalism world. Upon seeing “Snow Fall” and other similar projects, the authors started to make the connection between this form of storytelling and Special Collections. Special Collections are full of interesting, rich, and unique stories. Their digital representation, however, while widespread in systems such as ContentDM, can be lacking in sensory appeal. Because of this, the authors developed a “Snow Fall”-like application for a Special Collections’ exhibit, “Cradle of Coaches,” in the fall of 2013. In addition to this exhibit, they have developed two more using the same template. They feel that this is a new and exciting medium to tell the stories within special collections and archives, as well as general stories about libraries themselves.Item Improving the Effectiveness of LibGuides through Usability Testing
Sullivan, Elizabeth; Revelle, Andrew; Michel, Jason PaulAs information professionals, one of our primary responsibilities is to make information findable. As the amount of information continues to grow exponentially, the need to organize content and simplify the search process becomes imperative. We are eager to adopt any tools that can help us in this endeavor. Over 1,800 libraries throughout the world have adopted Springshare's LibGuides as a viable tool to organize resources. But how effective is our use of this powerful, highly-customizable tool? Have we structured content in a way that is intuitive and effective for our users? Miami University Libraries conducted formal testing on their LibGuides to determine the usability and effectiveness of the system. The results of these tests were used to compose a set of best practices for guides. This poster details the process and findings of our study.Item Automated Bulk Uploading of Images and Metadata to Flickr
(2014-03-26) Michel, Jason; Tzoc, EliasThe Digital Initiatives department at Miami University, like most Digital Initiatives and Special Collections, has a large amount of rich digital image collections, stored primarily in a third-party database. Typically, these databases aren't findable to the average web user. It was our desire to expose these collections to the wider web environment. We immediately thought of Flickr, the most prominent website for image discovery and sharing. Our problem was scale; the default uploading interface was too inefficient to push forward with the project. We developed a set of PHP scripts devised to interact with Flickr's API to allow for quick and efficient uploading of images as well as metadata such as titles, subjects, tags, and hyperlinks back to our collections. Once the scripts were in place the uploading process was completely automatic. Miami University Library’s Digital Initiatives department has uploaded over 5,000 images using this method and the results have been outstanding. New users are consistently attracted to the content and in about a year there have been nearly 200,000 views of our images. This article will discuss Flickr and the importance of contributing library materials to these types of social media sharing communities; explain the technology and programming involved in the project, and discuss our results and the outcomes of project.