Library Blogs

The BLUElab NicarAGUA team, in partnership with FNE International, has been collaborating with the El Jicaral, Nicaragua community since September 2015. Since that time, three in-country trips have been conducted. First, in 2016, a preliminary needs assessment trip was conducted in the surrounding communities. Through extensive surveys and interviews with members of communities visited, it was determined that the greatest need of this community was access to water during the dry season.

The Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce a new online exhibit: The Life and Times of Lizzy Bennet. This exhibit features a selection of materials from the physical exhibit commemorating the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen's death, which was on display in the Audubon Room of Hatcher Graduate Library, November 20, 2017 - March 30, 2018.

Are all library resources accessible for students, faculty, and staff with disabilities? Stephanie Rosen speaks on the work of the Digital Accessibility Team (DAT) and how they are trying to help everyone in the library answer this question.

We are very excited to announce that the Labadie Collection has acquired a new Emma Goldman archive. This is an important collection that had until recently been in private hands.

In this fourth entry in Donna Leon's mystery series set in Venice, Commissario Guido Brunetti investigates the deaths of three prominent Venetian businessmen, as well as their connection to eight young women who died when a truck crashed in the mountains of northern Italy. Meanwhile, his teenage daughter Chiara shows signs of following in her father's footsteps, as she becomes involved in the case.

As the fashionable elite came to eat dinner later and later in the day, supper became almost obsolete. As Maria Rundell notes in the 1813 edition of A New System of Domestic Cookery, “hot suppers are not much in use where people dine very late.” One exception to this rule was a ball, when late hours and active exercise called for substantial evening fare. In Emma, several of the main characters visit a local inn to assess its ability to host a ball, and much is made of the question of where to serve the supper. In the absence of a suitable room, Mrs. Weston proposes simply having sandwiches, but is adamantly shot down. In the words of the narrator, “A private dance, without sitting down to supper, was pronounced an infamous fraud upon the rights of men and women.”

Have you ever wondered what the Bennet sisters' adventures in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice might look like in the 21st century? On Wednesday, March 28th from 6:00-7:30pm, join Anne Charlotte Mecklenburg, PhD student in the University of Michigan's English Department, for a screening of selected mini-episodes from the web series The Lizzie Bennet Diaries, followed by discussion. This event will take place in the Shapiro Undergraduate Library, Screening Room 2160.

Han’s book provides insight into current events—Facebook, Cambridge Analytica, Russian propaganda, etc.—Big Data is the new Big Brother and it is Big Business. All of our sharing, all of our liking, all of the tracking of our every digitally connected movement (both voluntary and involuntary) has created the digital panopticon. We are transparent, we are quantified, we are stored and retrieved, we are added and reduced. We are packages of data to be bought and sold. But, Big Data is a Smart Power. It is friendly and it is Likeable. The power of Big Data is that it knows us and increasingly it can shape and predict our behavior.

As noted in Dining with Jane Austen II: No Such Thing as Lunch?, dinner shifted from noon-time to evening over the course of the 18th century, but this change occurred slowly and unevenly, with the result that certain households - especially those with claims to urbanity and fashion - might eat their main meal of the day much later than others. In Sense and Sensibility, The Dashwoods dine at 4pm at home in Barton Cottage, but in London, Mrs. Jenning’s begins dinner at 5 o’clock. In Pride and Prejudice, dinner is served at Longbourne at 4:30, but the fashionable Bingleys bring their London hours to Netherfield and dine at 6:30pm.

Update on work done by the Digital Preservation Unit including efforts on the Digital Preservation Lab, digital file formats, and community outreach.