Library Blogs

This is a re-posting of a HathiTrust blog post. HathiTrust receives well over a hundred inquiries every month about quality problems with page images or OCR text of volumes in HathiTrust. That’s the bad news. The good news is that in most of these cases, there is something they can do about it. A new blog post is intended to shed some light on the thinking and practices about quality in HathiTrust.

This Wednesday's watermark feature: stag motifs in watermarked papers from the Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

Here is a fascinating story of how we learned that the Special Collections Library holds a volume formerly owned by one of the most important figures in the history of science, Isaac Newton.

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide is a beautifully written short novel about a couple living in a quiet neighborhood in Tokyo, who come to love the neighbors' cat, who visits them every day. Through their love for the cat, they come to love each other better as well.

How to secure connections regardless of which network the clients are on.

For our Top 10 list in April, Mario Kart presented a strong front, as well as the usual contenders. When we look at the most popular games during Winter term, all of the newer systems dominated the list, with FIFA 15 being played nearly three times more than the game that came in second place.

On April 16 my colleague Evyn Kropf and I prepared a show & tell presentation of manuscripts and early printed books for the attendees of the symposium, "Speaking the End Times: Prophecy and Messianism in Early Modern Eurasia". In brief, this two-day conference explored the topic of early modern apocalypticism from India to Iberia.

Ariel by André Maurois is a fictionalized biography of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, focusing on his romance with his second wife, Mary Shelley, who became the author of Frankenstein.

This Wednesday's watermark feature, brought to you by the letter R: watermark in Isl. Ms. 147 (copied before 1431), another of the earliest manuscripts in our Islamic Manuscripts Collection on watermarked paper.

With thanks to the Digital Library Production Service (DLPS), we are happy to announce the launch of a new online collection. John James Audubon's The Birds of America was the founding purchase of the University Library in 1839 and as U-M celebrates its bicentennial, the Special Collections Library and the William L. Clements' Library have jointly purchased Audubon’s The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. All of Audubon’s mammals and a selection of the birds are now available online.