Library Blogs

The Nation Book Award Shortlist, announced today, recognizes the year's top 20 works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and young adult literature.

In an upcoming LTT blog post (hopefully, before the end of the calendar year), we will discuss U-M Library's process of enabling page insertions to Google volumes for our HathiTrust Digital Library.

A beautifully-written historical novel, with some fantasy elements, about a young man, born in the bell tower of a Swiss mountain village in the eighteenth century, who grows up with a beautiful singing voice and an extraordinary sense of hearing. He falls in love with a young woman from a wealthy family, but he has a secret he keeps from the woman he loves.

This past month was filled with FIFA across the board, with FIFA 15 being played over twice as much as any other game in our collection. Other new fan favorites also made the list, including Bloodborne and Dragon Age. And not one, but two copies of Super Smash Bros. Melee made the list this month, showing the lasting popularity of the game on campus.

Four years after the retirement of the paper callslip, the Special Collections Library's Reading Room experience has changed quite a bit...

The Special Collections Library recently opened a new exhibit in the Clark Library (2nd floor Hatcher), entitled Dining Out: Menus, Chefs, Restaurants, Hotels, & Guidebooks. Curated by Jan Longone, adjunct curator and donor of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archives (JBLCA), this exhibit celebrates the history of the eating out experience.

Lately I’ve been looking back through the past of the Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) -- in fact, all the way back to the time before DLPS, when we were the Humanities Text Initiative -- to see what, if anything, we’ve learned that will help us as we move forward into a world of Hydra, ArchivesSpace, and collaborative development of repository and digital resource creation tools.

In the first of a new mystery series set in ancient Rome, Flavia Albia, adopted daughter of author Lindsey Davis' popular series detective Marcus Didius Falco, investigates a series of random poisonings.

Based on her experiences as pastry chef for the Appeldore House resort, "Miss Parloa," as she came to be known to her students and readers, published her first work, The Appeldore Cook Book, in 1872. Over the course of her lifetime, Maria Parloa would go on to found a two cooking schools, publish nine more books, and endorse a variety of culinary products. Miss Parloa stood out from her contemporaries both because of her savvy business acumen and her emphasis on home economics.

In a previous post, I argued that we must judge a book by its cover because the design of an early binding can tell us much about the social status of its former owner. Now, I would like to argue that we can learn a lot about early printing history by examining the preliminary pages of a book.