Library Blogs

Pau Nava (they/them) was the 2021 Rackham Public Engagement Fellow hosted by the University of Michigan Library Digital Scholarship (DS) team. This initiative is part of the The Rackham Public Engagement Internship Program which offers summer fellowships for graduate students interested in pursuing public facing projects at various partner institutions within the University and beyond. Pau is a PhD Candidate in the University of Michigan’s department of American Culture. Their research focuses on Midwest Latinx art networks, and includes Latinx Digital Humanities projects such as the Chicana por mi raza (CPMR) digital memory project and the new digital tool Rhizomes of Mexican American Art Since 1848.

Welcome back! We are very excited to announce the reopening of the Computer & Video Game Archive (CVGA) this Fall, starting on Tuesday, August 31st. We are reopening with a new service model—outlined below—which will help us provide you with a space that is safer to visit as we adjust our services around COVID-19. While hours will be limited at first, we plan to expand our hours later in the semester once we have settled into the new service model and increased our staffing capacity.

Information about the 2021-22 Design Lab Internship program, including responsibilities and qualifications, as well as a link to the online application.

Find out more about the 2021-22 Design Lab Residency and how to apply.

In this mystery novel set in a seaside town in England, Harbinder Kaur, a gay Sikh police detective, investigates the murder of a ninety-year-old woman who had served as a "murder consultant" to mystery authors: helping them come up with ways to murder people. As Harbinder and three friends of the victim try to solve the crime, Harbinder discovers the victim may have been involved in espionage in Russia. Did someone take revenge? The plot takes many twists and turns. Griffiths also paints a vivid portrait of the world of crime fiction and the publishing industry. Harbinder is a strong character who faces prejudice in the police and elsewhere.

Enjoy some summer rest and relaxation reading with these recently acquired titles for the Library's OverDrive Collection.

When the pandemic quickly shut down our libraries' physical spaces, in-person services, and access to many of our physical resources, the Library didn’t know when we might reopen to campus. Over the last 16 months members of the Library Environments department collaborated with Facilities and department managers and colleagues to design, create, and evaluate our pandemic-based changes to physical spaces, workflows, and onsite services.

July 30th is International Day of Friendship. Check out these OverDrive titles on friendship: works that share the joys and challenges of staying connected, nurturing friendships, and creating community.

As a Classical Civilization major, completing a project about modern Greece presented a few unexpected challenges. However, the skills I learned while helping to create our exhibit were invaluable, and it's given me a new appreciation not only for Greece in all of its forms, but also for all of the work that librarians do.

When I applied to the Michigan Library Scholars program to work for the “A Survey of Global Open Access Policies” project, I took it as an opportunity to learn more about a particular side of publishing and law that I didn’t know much about. As someone who is double majoring in Political Science and Creative Writing & Literature, I have always been interested in how the law interacts with people’s creations — regardless of whether those creations are novels, pieces of artwork, or video games. For some reason, though, I’d never considered works of research under the same umbrella. Through this project, I’ve learned about the importance of open access policies and how they fuel innovation and generate new knowledge.