Library Blogs

I am pleased to showcase a student critique of the current exhibit, The Art and Science of Healing: From Antiquity to the Renaissance. Students of professor Aileen Das' class, Ancient Medicine in Greece & Rome, visited this exhibit at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology last February. They were assigned with the fascinating task of examining this display from various angles, not only from the perspective of the visitor but, more interestingly, also from the view of the exhibit curator. As I guided their visits, I tried to reconstruct for them the different stages involved in the making of this exhibit, from the original idea that I probably wrote on a piece of napkin, to the aesthetics of the display room and the painful selection of the witnesses of the story I wanted to tell: the artifacts themselves! But let us now hear Shannon's critical reaction:

Ever since reading Plato’s Symposium and studying the life and works of Gertrude Stein in undergraduate school, I have been obsessed with the idea of cultivating or participating in my own Greek symposium or French salon, a space for academics to express themselves and their research outside of the confines of traditional academia, a community of artists, scientists, intellectuals, where walls between disciplines and positionalities seem to crumble, a space to break bread together and unabashedly share ideas, and a space in which the resources to cultivate and manifest such ideas are made available.

The University of Michgan has a long history of student activism on campus, particularly around antiwar movements. An especially significant event was the Feburary 1970 protest against General Electric recruiting engineers on campus. The Labadie Collection’s Subject Vertical Files has documentation of this event which helps us understand the contexts of student activism in the past and present.

Ancient Roman private eye Marcus Didius Falco travels to the cities of southern Italy, including Pompeii eight years before the eruption of Vesuvius, to track down conspirators against the emperor Vespasian and to win the heart of the aristocratic woman he loves, Helena Justina. This is another thrilling entry in the popular mystery series.

The Asia Library and the Lieberthal-Rogel Center for Chinese Studies are co-sponsoring a physical exhibit, a curator talk, a conference, and an online exhibit about the history of dance in China.

Art historian and University of Michigan graduate Molly M. Lindner discusses the Vestal Virgins, priestesses who were among the most honored women of ancient Rome. At the heart of the book is a catalog of the surviving sculpture portraits of the Vestals. Lindner discusses how the sculptures can tell us more about the Vestals than written evidence can, and she writes about the Vestals' influence on other Roman women.

Join us at 1 pm this Thursday (30th March) in the Hatcher Library Gallery for a lecture and demonstration with papermaker and artist Radha Pandey.

When I think about my time in the design lab, I am struck by all that I have learned about the resources and fields of study at this University. I’m a School of Information undergraduate senior, and the network I am surrounded by at the Lab is the most academically diverse I have encountered in college. Every week, I meet and work with librarians, PhD students, master’s students and undergraduates in an environment where we are all equals who learn from one another.

The Audio/Moving Image Team has been digitizing audio since 2009. Read more to find out why, how, what we've done, what we're going to do, and what others are doing!

The library has resources to help prepare for the graduate or professional school application process.