Library Blogs

Portable calculators are older than we think. For our History of Mathematics Collection, we have recently purchased an example of a small manual calculator, whereby anyone could quickly perform each of the four basic mathematical operations. It was designed by the Frenchman Louis-J. Troncet in 1889.

The Digital Library hosts a stunning collection of 15 rare propaganda Chinese papercuts from the Cultural Revolution. The original papercuts were discovered in a closet at the Center for Chinese Studies!

Arthur Miller, Marge Piercy, and...Grandma? They might all be shelved together amid these stately gray volumes.

The University of Michigan Library is working hard to improve the accessibility of all our websites. This brings up a simple question: what does it mean to make a website accessible?

This inaugural post of Bits and Pieces answers the age old questions: What is digital preservation? Why are you writing about it? Who the heck are you?

In this eye-opening guide to professional food preparation, you'll braid fish fillets, sculpt dough cornucopias, and turn watermelons into shoes.

The popularity of FIFA in the archive continues to amaze. It was played 84 times in January, compared to #2 in our list of most popular games below, which was played only 34 times. Quite the disparity for one game franchise. We were also happy to see some new titles make the list, not to mention a good turnout of the current gen consoles. It doesn't look like the Xbox 360 will be falling out of favor anytime soon, though.

This month's recipe is "the Golden Loaf of South Carolina" from Sarah Tyson Rorer's 1899 _Bread and Bread-making: How to Make Many Varieties Easily and with the Best Results_ Rorer was involved in the Cooking School Movement, which advocated for standard measures and exact directions in recipes. While the recipe below is not as explicit as what a 21st century cookbook reader is used to, it goes into considerable detail compared to the average late-19th c. bread “receipt”

American Culinary History materials are full of representations of children and childhood: sometimes realistic, sometimes wholly fantastical, with adults present or without them.

This superb engraving depicts what the seventeenth-century English scientist, Robert Hooke, observed when exposing the head of a grey drone-fly through the lens of a microscope. The greatest section of the head was nothing else but two large “protuberant bunches,” mostly covered by thousands of tiny hemispheres arranged in “triagonal order”.