Library Blogs

Fall semester begins on Tuesday, and so do the fall hours in the CVGA. Yes, by popular demand, we are adding hours on Saturday.We are also planning our first tournament in the CVGA, for sometime late September or early October. Stay tuned for details soon...

Bad news and good news: The bad news is that the archive will be closed all next week, due to the intersession. Regular summer hours will resume the week of August 31, though we'll of course be closed on Labor Day.The good news is that starting September 8 not only will we expand our daily hours to 10am - 9pm, we'll also be adding Saturday hours of 3pm to 9pm.

Over the course of the summer, various camp groups from here at U-M have made use of the video game archive for their campers, including Camp CAEN and GISE (Girls in Science and Engineering) Summer Day Camp.

The University of Michigan Library launched its new web site today. The new site marks a significant change from the old. More than two years in the making, the new site has been vetted through extensive user testing and a four-month beta period. Our goal was to improve access to the information resources the University Library provides through its 19 physical locations, hundreds of databases and research guides, and thousands of online journals.

The University of Michigan Library has received a CLIR grant to provide specialized access to Islamic manuscripts. Users of the site will be able to contribute to the description/cataloging of each item. We are digitizing 1250 manuscripts as part of this project, and I thought it would be worthwhile to share the following summary of the process.

From the July 2009 issue of Scientific American: “A pernicious excitement to learn and play [this game] has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should we regret this? It may be asked. We answer, [this game] is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body..."

The Computer & Video Game Archive will be closed Thursday & Friday July 2-3.

Robin Burkinshaw created a homeless family in Sims 3 and has been blogging their story at Alice and Kev: The story of being homeless in The Sims 3. Start at the beginning; you'll find their story fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking.

Local gaming store Get Your Game On is now a University of Michigan vendor, so I went down there this afternoon and picked out some old games for the archive: Atari, Intellivision, Genesis, NES, SNES, PS1, etc. A big thanks to Manager John for all his help!

A major milestone for the HathiTrust partners was reached on April 27, 2009 as we released a temporary beta catalog for the digital library, offering bibliographic search (title, author, subject, ISBN, publisher, and year of publication) and faceted browse of all items in HathiTrust. The catalog is built using the open source VuFind software and is temporary, pending the release of permanent catalog to be built by OCLC in conjunction with a HathiTrust partner team.