Library Blogs

More on our adventure with recovering Zip disks!

Earlier this month, Special Collections was pleased to host WEMU news reporter Jorge Avellan as he researched a story for their "Hidden in Plain Sight" program, featuring Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cook Book. This unpreposessing little 39-page booklet in faded paper wrappers is one of the greatest treasures of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. Published in Paw Paw, Michigan in 1866, A Domestic Cook Book is the only known copy of the oldest known cookbook published by an African American.

What would you do with 500 blank postcards? For contributors to The Alternative Press, the answers varied. Some hand-wrote poetry on their cards. Some made images--by painting, drawing, collaging, or pasting photographs onto paper. Some embraced the postcard format, while others challenged it--for example, Carol Steen made all of her postcards in brass, a playful take on the form you could never actually use them to mail a message to a friend.

Design Lab Resident Connor Lockman discusses his work with machine learning and animal classification projects on the Zooniverse platform.

Design Lab Resident Connor Lockman discusses an online course he took on neural networks.

As the Winter term comes to an end, we like to take a look back and see which games were most popular in the archive over the course of the year. We take a look at our top 10 games over the Winter term, with FIFA being played about 3 times as often as anything else. We also have a few new games that have taken off, including Spider-Man, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey and the surprise couch co-op hit, Overcooked 2. Looking at our top 10 list over the Fall and Winter semester, we see some similarities, with FIFA taking the lead and Mario Kart making the list as well. In addition, Rock Band 3 made it on the list for the first time in quite awhile.

Graduating senior Meggie Brody shares what she learned from working in a variety of positions at U-M Library, and says, "If I can leave future U-M students with one piece of advice, it would be this: don’t be afraid to ask."

Design Lab Audio Intern Holli Konrad reflects on what she's learned through her work at the Lab.

I attended a workshop put on by the Wolverinesoft student development club on programming your own graphics for video games on February 14th. That’s right, Valentines Day. It could not be a more appropriate date because it was a lovely workshop put on by David Degazio; a passionate, intelligent and gregarious student leader in Wolverinesoft.

A few weeks ago I attended one of the Community Nights we have in the Shapiro Design Lab each week. At each event, a Design Lab staff member workshops an activity for the rest of the lab. In the past, these presentations have included everything from citizen science to meditation. On this particular night, Jeff had all of us work together to build Nintendo LABO toys.