Library Blogs

Much of our U of M community celebrates Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month in April in order to be able to honor AAPI experiences while most students are still on campus, but national celebrations are just beginning with the official start of the month kicking off on May 1st. If you were too caught up in exams back in April and now find yourself having some time to read, stop by Shapiro’s 2nd floor to browse 35 selected memoirs by AAPI authors!

Do you ever wonder how much more we can know about the water that we depend on? This semester, I was involved in a Student Engagement Fellowship with the U-M Library on the Huron River named A River Runs Through Us. The Huron River Watershed, which serves as a vital resource for our community and the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, is currently facing a multitude of challenges, including but not limited to a creeping dioxane plume and regular wastewater releases, making it ever more essential for us to become more informed about these issues and take action to protect this important river. Undoubtedly, the health and sustainability of the watersheds surrounding us directly affect not only our own lives, but also the lives of the various beings and organisms that inhabit our environment. For this reason, our goal for the project is to highlight these issues as well as resources and local activists that have been doing great work to protect the river and the watershed.

The Fake News Educational Materials Fellowship was initially conceived with the intention of researching fake news, misinformation, and disinformation within journalism in a range of areas: the psychological and socio-economic causes of the creation and circulation of fake news; data literacy and determining credibility; and bias in news reporting, analysis, and selection.

After the successful launch of our ArcLight finding aids application on April 19, 2023 - and the deprecating of our homegrown Digital Library eXtension Service (DLXS) finding aids application - we are sharing our reflections on the project with the wider community. This blog post will describe the history of finding aids at the University of Michigan Library and what led us to develop the ArcLight finding aids application, starting in earnest in 2020. We will describe our goals for the project, the organization of the development team, and the modifications that we needed to make to effectively complete the project. We will give an overview of what a finding aids application does, and why we decided to use ArcLight as well as Docker and Kubernetes as our new containerization and hosting solution. We will discuss what was advantageous to us for this project as well as what was particularly challenging, and sum up what we learned from our archives partners and end-users, throughout the project.