Library Blogs

My name is Qihao Liang, and I’m a rising senior in Sociology in the Honors Program. I am deeply grateful for the U-M Library Student Mini Grant, which supported my May 8 to 23, 2025 fieldwork in Taiwan for my honors thesis on investment and education migration between Mainland China and Taiwan since 2008. I also want to thank Dr. Liangyu Fu, Director of the Asia Library, whose research guidance, fieldwork planning, and safety check-ins made this work possible. Writing in mid-August, I see how being on the ground in Taiwan reshaped my project; embodiment became tangible (what Ruth Behar calls “the vulnerable observer”), bringing emotional resonance and my own researcher subjectivity into view. Stepping onto the island as a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with relatives separated across the Strait, I learned that self-exposure, the experience of being scrutinized and scrutinizing, and the slow time of fieldwork with participants—walking, eating, talking, getting lost—led me and, I hope, my readers to places that Zoom calls, archives, and scraping Instagram, Xiaohongshu, or Threads cannot reach.

We are delighted to announce the upcoming opening of a new exhibit highlighting a selection of rare books from the University of Michigan's collections, each of which illustrates binding topics featured in "Suave Mechanicals," the acclaimed nine-volume series dedicated to the study of the art and history of bookbinding.

The University of Michigan Library’s Bible: King James Version (KJV) digital collection is one of our oldest and most-visited text collections. At nearly 30 years old, the collection’s design reflects the early days of the Web. With effort underway to update the functional underpinnings of our digital collections, it was time to return to the KJV to study how well the text would work within our updated site layout, which is now used across the majority of our text collections.

We invite you to look back with us at some of the Asia Library’s most meaningful moments from the past academic year.