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AccessMichigan: The Challenges and Rewards of Statewide Library Cooperation

Slide 4 of 17

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The Michigan Electronic Library (MEL) today. (http://mel.org)

Notes:

This is what MEL looks like today; I didn’t have access to a 1996 version of this site.

MEL is a flat file of URLs that are selected by a team of about a dozen librarians. They are selected for their relevance to the staff and users of libraries of all types around the state. It only includes free sites.

This section (POINT TO THE BROWSE SECTION) is the heart of MEL: it leads to about 30,000 sites organized by topic area.

Each selector is also supposed to check for 404s and other flawed links in his or her area of responsibility, but that is, or at least it was during my term there, a fairly hit or miss proposition.

(POINT TO SPAN)

This is a link to the Serials, Periodicals and Newspapers database, a union list of serials held by MI libraries. SPAN was named after the Mackinaw Bridge that connects the upper and lower peninsulas of the state.

(POINT TO THE AM LINK IN BLUE AT TOP)

This is a link to the AccessMichigan site, but I’m not ready to talk about how that got here yet.