Library Blogs

Aimi Hamraie visited University of Michigan, as a part of Disability Awareness Month, and shared her well-known book as Building Access: Universal Design and the Politics of Disability. Hamraie shared key points from her book such as strategies for designing and making things more accessible for those with disabilities. She shared history from the time people have been advocating for rights and accessibility to now. Lastly, she discussed her remarkable work at Vanderbilt University with an ongoing project revolving around participatory mapping, data collection, and Crip technoscience project that are based on principles of disability justice, intersectionality, and spatial practice to explore mapping as a tool for social justice.

When approaching projects on accessibility, I first wanted to understand my community. Who I am designing for? What goals am I trying to achieve? With these questions in mind, I chose to focus my attention on diversity in technology. More people are using technology than ever before. How can we then use technology as a tool to, not only acknowledge, but improve the lives of the diverse groups of people within our communities? The Michigan Meetings Fall Symposium took a closer look into these questions.

Join us on Tuesday, January 15 for the next Special Collections After Hours event! This month, we're feeling the winter chill and offering up a frosty selection from our collections. Come see materials related to snow and winter, as well as some toasty recipes to take the edge off the Michigan chill.

This is the first of a series of mysteries set in 1920s India, featuring Perveen Mistry, one of the first female lawyers in India. She investigates the murder of a man at the home of the three widows of a wealthy Muslim mill owner. The widows live in strict seclusion and will talk to Perveen, while they cannot talk to a male lawyer. In alternating chapters set a few years earlier, we learn of the traumas Perveen went through as a young woman, and her disastrous marriage. Author Massey conveys a wonderful sense of the various cultures and religions in 1920s India.

Asia Library has had a wonderful year already: on January 3 we received a donation of some 200 Kodachrome slides from Margaret Condon Taylor (Ph.D. psychology, 1983).

When did you first learn about the function of a library? What did you learn was the role of a library? Library Communication and Marketing Intern Meggie Brody surveyed undergraduates in her search for the cause of library anxiety.

This 1799 edition of The Images of Saints from the family of the Emperor Maximilian I (1459-1519) contains for the very first time an almost complete series of the woodcuts that were originally commissioned by Maximilian I to illustrate the legends, history and genealogy of earlier saints claimed to be connected to the House of Habsburg.

The Shapiro Design Lab seeks undergraduate students to become Audio Interns for the upcoming semester, to help develop the Lab's programs in audio production and post-production.

Over the past 20 years, the University of Michigan Library has led the way on creating digital collections and establishing best practices around digital preservation that have become benchmark standards for other libraries. However, as our web presence expanded, it became increasingly difficult to adapt it at scale, keep pace with the changing needs of research, and create cohesion between a growing number of applications, sites, and services. It eventually became clear that a new model for web governance was needed. In this post, learn about the library’s history around its web governance and what led us to establish a new committee to create a vision and strategy for our web presence. You’ll also read about some of the committee’s accomplishments so far and learn how the committee’s members are supporting the recently launched Library Search application and the ongoing website redesign.

We are upgrading the software that runs Deep Blue Data to Hyrax2. This upgrade will results in some changes and improvements to the user interface and functionality of the Deep Blue Data repository.