Library Blogs

We are very pleased to invite you all to the second session of a series of virtual encounters on various aspects of book history. On this occasion, our online meeting is devoted to several issues regarding book production, the press, and readership in the Philippines under different administrations between 1850 and 1950.

The China Ongoing Perspectives (CHOP) film series, co-sponsored by the Lieberthal Rogel Center for Chinese Studies (LRCCS) and Asia Library, entered its second year in the midst of a pandemic.

The 2020 University of Michigan LSA Fall theme semester is Democracy & Debate: Speak, Act, Vote. My second blogpost surrounding the themed semester highlights physical and electronic books in the library about voting.

Academic library service portfolios are mostly a mix of big to small strategic initiatives and tactical projects. Systems developed in the past can become a durable bedrock of workflows and services around the library, remaining relevant and needed for five, ten, and sometimes as long as twenty years. There is, of course, never enough time and resources to do everything. The challenge faced by Library IT divisions is to balance the tension of sustaining these legacy systems while continuing to innovate and develop new services. The University of Michigan’s Library IT portfolio has legacy systems in need of ongoing maintenance and support, in addition to new projects and services that add to and expand the portfolio. We, at Michigan, worked on a process to balance the portfolio of services and projects for our Library IT division. We started working on the idea of developing a custom tool for our needs since all the other available tools are oriented towards corporate organizations and we needed a light-weight tool to support our process. We went through a complete planning process first on whiteboards and paper, then developed an open source tool called TRACC for helping us with portfolio management.

Murder on the Champ de Mars is part of a long-running mystery series set in Paris. A young Romany man approaches detective Aimée Leduc and says he has information about the murder of her father. As fans of the series know, Aimée has been searching for her father's murderer since the first book in the series. When Aimée goes to meet the young man, he is murdered in front of her eyes, but she never gets a good look at the killer. This book also tells of the tragic history of the Romany people in France.