Library Blogs

L2P Project (Lead to Pixels): Dr. Rebecca M. Chung

If someone sees a book image on a screen, are they truly reading a book? If not, then how can digitization be used to transmit the material and historical features of reading? The materiality of the text connects the creation of that text to its historical moment. Historical context is as much about paper composition, assembly techniques, enclosure styles, and chemical composition—as about dates or places or names. The L2P project works on reconstructing the material characteristics of a text embedded in its historical moment—both type and ornaments, by combining book history research, digital images, and printing technologies from letterpress to electronic.

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A quick look into what was happening in Design Lab 1 on the morning of January 24, featuring a course offered through the Living Arts program.

Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood tells the story of The Daily Show host Trevor Noah's childhood in South Africa.

Preserving the history of labor movements has been core to the Labadie Collection’s mission since its very beginnings more than a century ago. In 2016, two important collections on 20th century labor organizing have been arranged to better facilitate research. The Joyce Kornbluh Collection (3.25 linear ft.) and the Don Stewart IWW Collection (3 linear ft.) conserve evidence of the regular confrontations between workers, corporations, and government throughout the past hundred years.

RJ speaks about his first semester as a Design Lab Resident.

Ever wonder about the myriad decisions and changes colleges students go through during their four or so years? Practice for Life: Making Decisions in College helps answer those questions.

In the latest entry in Alan Bradley's mystery series featuring Flavia de Luce, a twelve-year-old chemistry genius in 1950s England, Flavia returns to England after being expelled from a boarding school in Canada and finds out her father is ill with pneumonia. Her sisters give her a less than warm welcome, and to get away from the house, she carries a letter from the vicar's wife to a wood-carver, only to find the man dead, hanging upside-down from his bedroom door. She conducts her own investigation of the murder, and finds a connection between the murdered man and an author of children's poetry, who also died mysteriously.

Isaac Levine and I have immersed ourselves in the troubling yet rewarding world of guitar effects pedal construction. What began as a short project designed to bolster our knowledge of circuitry in musical instruments has now turned into a lengthy trek to explore the instructional resources of the internet, the inventory of the North Campus WorkBench, and the variability of the electrical components required for guitar effects pedal construction.

Over Fall 2016, the University of Michigan Library updated most of its web sites to operate exclusively on a secure, HTTPS, protocol. Along the way, we learned a few lessons.

Women in Early America (NYU, 2015), edited by Thomas Foster, is the latest in a line of scholarly histories examining the ways that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women were actually key players in the economic, cultural, and political life of the American colonies despite the many legal and societal obstacles they had to overcome due to their gender. Most chapters in this wide-ranging work, each written by an expert in the field, focus on specific regions or identities. There is a chapter on the gendering of slave ownership in colonial Jamaica, for example, and another on trade and power in Early French America and Detroit. More familiar topics are also covered, like the connections between witchcraft and resistance to patriarchy or the lives of loyalist women in British-occupied New York City. Our own Mary C. Kelley, Ruth Bordin Collegiate Professor of History, American Culture, and Women's Studies, contributes the final chapter of the book. As in her well-known work Learning to Stand And Speak: Women, Education, And Public Life In America's Republic (UNC, 2006), Kelley discusses the ramifications of a revolution in women’s educational opportunities between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars that enabled many to take up positions in the public sphere as writers, educators, and reformers.