Library Blogs

The Shapiro Undergraduate Library is starting off the new year with a bicentennial-themed display of books about all 200 years of U-M's history. A critical part of that history, and a strong component of our display, is the inclusion of women at the university. In this post, we feature five of our many books about women at Michigan.

A curator's overview of the exhibit “The Florence Flood, November 1966: The Conservation of Books at the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale and Beyond.”

Over the past several months, Digital Content & Collections has worked on new procedures for handling accessions from patrons for HathiTrust. What happens if no HathiTrust contributing institution has their volume on their shelves, and the volume is a good addition to the HathiTrust corpus? In these cases, U-M Library steps into the breach. We can easily handle a small throughput of these volumes from HathiTrust, and we handle three kinds of accessions: physical, digital and virtual.

An 8-year project to digitize our Islamic Manuscripts Collection is now finished!

The Unwilling Vestal is a historical novel, originally published in 1918, about Brinnaria, a young girl in ancient Rome who is forced to become a Vestal virgin after she refuses to marry the man her father has chosen for her. During her thirty years of service as a Vestal virgin, she is determined to stay true to the man she loves and marry him at the end of her service. But her rejected suitor threatens to have her accused of breaking her vows, and the emperor Commodus (who may be familiar to you as the villain of the movie Gladiator) will go along with the accusation unless Brinnaria proves her innocence. The Unwilling Vestal still reads well, and is full of fascinating details about ancient Rome.

The Liber medicinalis (Book of Medicine) is a medical treatise of around 1,200 dactylic hexameters, traditionally attributed
to the second-century Roman author, Quintus Serenus Sammonicus (d. beginning of 3rd c. AD). It contains sixty-four therapeutic recipes,
divided into two sections: recipes for illnesses affecting individual organs listed from head to toe, and recipes for general ailments like injuries, fevers, fractures and dislocations, insomnia, toothache, and poisoning.

Our link resolver at the University of Michigan Library is branded as MGet It. Its purpose is to provide a pathway to online articles and other electronic resources. On October 17th, we replaced the now old link resolver with a custom redesigned solution created using Umlaut, an open-sourced link resolver or “item service provider for libraries.”

If you’re familiar with the video gaming community you may know that Final Fantasy XV came out yesterday, 10 years after the announcement was first made. What you may not know is that we here at the CVGA have many of the original games in the series.

Today we celebrate the final day of Picture Book Month and also the 349th birthday of Jonathan Swift, English satirist and poet, most famous for his authorship of Gulliver’s Travels. In honor of both, this post highlights two picture book editions for children from the Hubbard Collection of Imaginary Voyages.

In March 2015, Michigan Publishing was awarded a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for a project entitled “Building a Hosted Platform for Managing Monographic Source Materials.” In a nutshell, Fulcrum, as the platform is now called, is about building an online platform using the Hydra/Fedora framework to publish media-rich scholarship.

The core team consists of a project lead, project manager, data librarian, UI/UX specialist and three developers.

Below is one of our stories, boldly told through the lens of the project manager. No developers were seriously harmed in the writing of this post.