Library Blogs

Documenting your data is kind of like eating your spinach. You know that you need to do it to keep your data healthy, but it’s not something that you look forward to. Good documentation takes an investment of time and energy. It can feel like grunt work, or that it is slowing you down when you really want to keep making progress on your research.

The Oxford English Dictionary defines organized as: “Of a person: having one's affairs in order so as to be able to deal with them efficiently.”

When you spend the best hours of your day doing research and working with data, it makes sense to be organized so you can use your time as efficiently as possible. One of the methods for maintaining an organized research life is by developing a data management plan (DMP).

Welcome to our series of Love Your Data Week posts! Each day this week, in connection with the Love Your Data campaign on social media, a UM librarian will be blogging about a different data-related topic, sharing personal anecdotes and tips that you can use to improve your own research data practices. To kick things off, we're writing today about data safety.

Bits and Pieces is expanding its discussion to include lots about research data!

Lucrezia Tornabuoni de' Medici is the biography of an extraordinary Renaissance woman, the mother of Lorenzo de' Medici, ruler of Florence in the fifteenth century. Lucrezia was a skilled businesswoman who influenced the policies of both her husband and her son, as well as being a poet and a patron of the arts. She was closely acquainted with some of the greatest Renaissance artists, including Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo.

People of the Library is an ongoing series brought to you by a group of students called the Michigan Library Engagement Collaborative. They will interview library staff as well as the students, faculty and community members who use our Library. Our first interview is with Alexandra Stark.

We got a donation earlier this month with a number of older game gems, including Frogger the Board Game. The inside bears quite a resemblance to the video game screen that most of us are familiar with. We also got a number of Atari 5200 and Atari Lynx games in the donation, several with really interesting covers.

Here are our most popular games played in the archive during the month of January. FIFA definitely tops the list, with the Xbox One version finally surpassing the Xbox 360 version. The new Star Wars Battlefront falls shortly behind, also causing a resurgence of the older PlayStation 2 Battlefront game further down the list.

Daughter of Venice is a novel about Donata, a young woman from a noble family in 16th century Venice, who has to enter a convent because her father cannot afford a dowry for her. She doesn't want to spend her life in a convent, so she dresses up as a boy and explores Venice, eventually falling in love with a Jewish man, who doesn't know who she really is. Will she tell him her secret? And will they be allowed to be together?

The exhibit Shakespeare on Page and Stage: A Celebration (Audubon Room, January 11-April 27, 2016) showcases both the textual and performance history of Shakespeare’s plays. This post will be the first of a series exploring specific productions in greater detail than the limited physical space of an exhibition allows. Today, we share additional material from Ellen Van Volkenburg's early 20th century marionette production of A Midsummer Night's Dream.