Library Blogs

Historian Catherine Fletcher tells the fascinating story of Alessandro de' Medici, the first Duke of Florence and arguably the first person of African descent to rule a European state.

While the start of the 2017 college football season is still a long way off, you can binge on the glorious and fascinating history of Michigan Football year round by visiting the library. The Hatcher and Shapiro Libraries have enough books about Bo Schembechler, the Big House, and our famous football rivalries to satisfy even the strongest appetite for gridiron history.

This historical novel tells the story of the brilliant Renaissance artist Fra Filippo Lippi and Lucrezia Buti, the woman who inspired him.

Starting last October, I worked as the University of Michigan Library Student Engagement Ambassador. With six other wonderful ambassadors, we aimed to actively publicize library resources and services to the campus community through events and social media. We functioned in two different teams: the programming team focused on creating and planning events while the social media team concentrated on publicizing by making posts on Facebook and Twitter. The system was flexible enough to chime in and share ideas on both parts through our whole group meetings. I soon noticed that viewing the library from a student’s perspective could be effective.

We are pleased to announce the opening of a new exhibit from the Special Collections Library. It includes an extraordinary selection of magical, religious, and medical artifacts held at Special Collections, the Papyrology Collection, and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. These objects are an extraordinary evidence of how people coped with physical and mental ailments from antiquity through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance.

Quantitative data gives you the hard numbers: what, how many times, when, generally who, and where. Quantitative data also leaves out the biggest and possibly most important factor: why.

Insider view of the Shapiro Design Lab from the Library Student Engagement Ambassadors. The Ambassadors had the fantastic opportunity to tour the Shapiro Design Lab and find out all about what different facilities and capabilities they have there. We even got to try out some of the equipment, which was pretty cool!

The Value of the Dollar is an interesting collection of historical information on topics ranging from the prices of different goods, the wages made by people in different jobs, and other measures of the value of the dollar over time.

A student perspective and reflection from the exhibit “Striving to Stimulate Serious Thought: Jewish Scholarly and Cultural Life at Michigan Across Two Centuries”.

As I think back to my experiences in the Design Lab, I am struck by the community we have created in just a few months. Being in graduate school can sometimes, perhaps surprisingly, be a somewhat isolating experience. Having a narrow, specific area of study can mean that graduate students are often interacting with, and learning from, a relatively small group of people throughout much of our educational experience. As a result of this, there can be a lack of shared knowledge between students in different disciplines, and the knowledge of these different disciplines can become siloed.