Library Blogs

Although the University of Michigan was founded in 1817, it was not until the University re-located to Ann Arbor in the late 1830s that the University began working towards the establishment of a University Library. The first “official” purchase for the library was made in February 1838, just a few months before Asa Gray set out on his European book-buying voyage.

Maybe you’ve heard of or lived with a roommate who never washed the dishes, who talked loudly on the phone late into the night or who stiffed you on rent. Not fun. Bias in our research isn’t fun either. It distorts the nature of the data we collect, analyze and share.

Late in the Winter term, several students from Kelli Wood's class (HISTART 194: Video Games - Cultures in Play) presented their final projects in the Duderstadt Gallery, in an exhibition entitled, "Are Video Games Art?" The exhibition included several meaningful presentations, and highlighted some of the game systems in the CVGA. We wanted to share some pictures from the event with you.

In January of 2016, Professor Susan Siegfried reached out to Pablo Alvarez and myself with a proposal: a class focused on 19th century color plate books, tightly focused on the use of original materials, with weekly meetings in Special Collections and out-of-class assignments, drawing heavily on the private collection of Dr. James Ravin, MD, of Toledo. Would we facilitate such an endeavor? Could we?

This delightful little book, which can be read in one sitting, is a diary kept by novelist and literary editor Diana Athill during a visit to Florence in 1947. She writes about the sights of Florence, the delicious food she ate, and the people she met there.

The first in a series of how-to guides helping you to preserve your personal files and archives!

In this post, student Eric Morgel provides a brief overview of Asa Gray's foundational purchase of materials for the University Library.

Looking for vacation reading? The popular Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki has published a new book.

A pop-up exhibit (or rare book meet and greet, as we later came to call them) is an informal, short-term display of Special Collections materials. We take our items outside of the Reading Room because we want as many people as possible to engage with our collections and ask our staff questions. This year, we held six of these exhibits in three locations within the Hatcher & Shapiro Libraries and we're excited to tell you what we've learned from a year of ephemeral events.

The Michigan Daily Digital Archives is a joint collaboration between the University of Michigan Library IT division, Michigan Daily, and the Bentley Historical Library. The Michigan Daily Digital Archives provides searchable access to over 300 volumes, 23,000 issues of digitized student newspaper, from 1891 through 2014. New volumes of the newspaper will be added in the future as they become available. The Library IT team developed a robust discovery interface for the archives. The team made the choice of building a discovery system instead of using an out of the box application or vended solutions. The development team followed Scrum-like Agile approach for website development.