Library Blogs

Here is our Top 10 list of popular games for this past month. A game beats FIFA in the ranking for the first time in ages, and Smash rises in the ranks (probably students celebrating the fact that we allow it every day during the Spring and Summer).

We'll probably see more classic games making the list as well, as students vow over the Summer to finish "that old game I always wanted to get through but never had time for."

HathiTrust started out with only content digitized by Google, but a goal from early on was to support digitized book material from a variety of sources. One early effort provided a toolkit to partners for preparing content, but which turned out to require more technical effort than was reasonable. We rethought our approach and simplified the requirements for partners while maintaining the same high quality standards for HathiTrust.

This short novel consists entirely of a monologue by a librarian in a small town in France. She speaks about the role of the library in society, her love life or lack thereof, her snobbish colleagues, her reflections on French history, and the deficiencies of the Dewey Decimal system.

Shortly after I completed a blog post arguing that the Special Collections Library holds a book formerly owned by Isaac Newton, another one has just resurfaced from the Le Roy Crummer Collection, part of our rich holdings in the history of medicine.

Our last Fairy Tale Friday recounted Hans Christian Andersen’s The Red Shoes - a story about a girl whose vanity led to the loss of her feet and, ultimately, her life. Footwear features prominently again in today’s fairy tale. However, unlike Karen’s cursed dancing shoes, Aschenputtel finds that her golden slippers are the vehicle of her own reward and of revenge against her cruel stepsisters.

The Special Collections Library Image Bank is a repository intended to capture the digitized images of Special Collections materials in the public domain created for incidental requests — such as those from patrons or from curatorial staff for outreach initiatives.

In culmination of this year’s Poetry at Literati series, Anne Waldman, whose papers are part of the U-M Special Collections Library, will be performing tonight with fellow poet Anne Carson at 7:30pm at Ann Arbor’s Literati Bookstore (124 E. Washington). Anne Waldman is renowned for her dynamic poetry performances, which are intended "to conjure states of mind and possibilities, and to wake people up to poetry as an active condition. As an experience in and of itself."

This is a re-posting of a HathiTrust blog post. HathiTrust receives well over a hundred inquiries every month about quality problems with page images or OCR text of volumes in HathiTrust. That’s the bad news. The good news is that in most of these cases, there is something they can do about it. A new blog post is intended to shed some light on the thinking and practices about quality in HathiTrust.

This Wednesday's watermark feature: stag motifs in watermarked papers from the Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

Here is a fascinating story of how we learned that the Special Collections Library holds a volume formerly owned by one of the most important figures in the history of science, Isaac Newton.