When Apple releases a new product, the tech community is whipped up into a frenzy as they watch Steve Jobs demonstrate the company’s latest creation.  This week Mr. Jobs revealed the much anticipated iPad. Here at SeekingMichigan, we have introduced some new features, but we were unable to rent out the Cobo Center for a keynote; this blog post will have to do.

The first, most noticeable feature, is the new image viewer. When you view an image or a document, you can now pan the image, just as you would pan the map on Google Maps by clicking on and dragging the image around. Zooming is also much faster since the entire page won’t have to be reloaded each time a zoom button is clicked. Zooming can also be performed by a “slider bar” so that you can immediately jump to the appropriate zoom level. Once you are zoomed in, the overview pane in the top left corner of the image allows you to quickly pan by dragging the red box, which represents the current viewing area. Thanks to UNLV’s dmMonocle plugin for this feature.

Screenshot of the new image viewer

A second new feature, which is less apparent, is the ability to enter quoted phrases into your search to limit your search by specific phrases. The digital content system we use was built with a certain way of searching in mind — that search terms are entered into separate text boxes depending on whether you want to search for an exact phrase or a set of keywords. A different convention is common on the web in which any exact phrases are surrounded in quotes and any unquoted words are flexible keywords. Just this week, we have added the ability to search our digital archives much the same way you search Google. For instance, if I want to search for the Olds mansion in Lansing, I would enter Lansing “Olds mansion” into the Seek search box. This will pull up all records that contain “Lansing” or the phrase “Olds mansion”. Try it out!