Library Blogs

This post highlights one of the new members to the DBRRDS team! Peter Cerda is Data Curation Specialist for Workflows and Big Data.

This post highlights one of the new members to the DBRRDS team! Daniel Alexander is Data Curation and Research Reproducibility Specialist. He'll be working jointly with MIDAS and the DBRRDS team.

As July begins, it feels as though the summer continues to speed by at an alarming rate – but there’s always time to pause to recognize Disability Pride Month! To mark Disability Pride Month at the library, you can find a display of books by disabled authors and/or featuring disabled characters on the first floor of Shapiro throughout July. Not on campus? This mix of fiction and nonfiction titles in the display are also available online now.

In 2021, at least partially due to the reckonings of the 2020 Black Lives Matter uprisings, the United States recognized Juneteenth as a national holiday. While this holiday may be new to some people, many Black Americans have been celebrating this day commemorating emancipation for centuries, and there is a wealth of writing on its history and significance. With this in mind, though Juneteenth may have passed on Monday, it’s always the right time to educate ourselves on the history of race and racism in this country.

One of the main activities the Deep Blue Repository & Research Data Services team conducts is data curation(1)--that is, actions that provide meaningful and enduring access to data. The accessibility of research data has been an under-discussed phenomenon in the field of research data management, but we are excited to announce the release of a new resource intended to help curators as well as researchers approach the release of research data with the goal of maximizing accessibility--in particular for those with disabilities, neurodivergence, and/or who use assistive technologies.

Celebrating Pride feels more important than ever, as we’ve seen a significant rise in cultural and political attacks on queer and particularly trans people over the past year. Those attacks have included a surge in attempts to ban books with LGBTQ+ content in schools -- check out some of these banned titles online or in Shapiro now!

Welcome to the University of Michigan Library’s Book Arts Studio, a place for students, faculty, and the community to learn and practice the craft of letterpress printing, offering the opportunity to engage in other related activities, such as bookbinding and the book arts.

We are no longer able to accept unsolicited game donations in the CVGA. Prior to sending or bringing us games please contact us first at video.games@umich.edu with an itemized list of the games and equipment that you would like to donate, so that we can check against our collection records to see what we need.

Guest post by Brian Bocking, Heid Fellow, on his research in the Harry Alverson Franck Papers. Brian is Professor Emeritus of the Study of Religions at University College Cork (Cork, Ireland).

University of Michigan Press is exploring different ways of communicating the “impact” of the open access program, Fund to Mission, with impact defined as “provable benefits on the real world.” As part of this exploration, the Press worked with Zhenkun Lin, a doctoral student from the U-M College of Engineering, under the auspices of the Rackham Doctoral Internship initiative. The charge for Zhenkun’s project was very broad: Please explore the data we have gathered and see if it suggests any interesting patterns or opportunities for visualizing the program’s impact.