Library Blogs

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. With this post, we focus in greater detail on Paul Robeson’s performance as Othello in Ellen Van Volkenburg and Maurice Browne’s 1930 London production at the Savoy Theater.

You probably know that the University of Michigan Library offers a variety of educational programs, but did you know that these programs include topics relevant to working with research data?

Shelby Stuart, second year graduate student in the School of Information writes about her experiences working in the graduate library. The Trial Resources Evaluation project—and my UISA experience more broadly—has challenged me to step outside of my comfort zone by taking on greater responsibility and becoming one of the “go to” people for the project, but it has paid off in the skills and experiences that I’ve gained as a result.

The Special Collections Library would like to wish Lydia Maria Child a happy 214th birthday! Join us in remembering this 19th-century American treasure whose words sought to enlighten and entertain.

It is common scholarly practice to publish results of research, and it is becoming increasingly more important to share the underlying data. Data sharing allows for the replicability and verification of experimental findings and allow for reuse in new and unexpected ways. Sharing your data may also increase the impact of your research.

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.

An extraordinary project is currently taking shape at the Wolverine Press, the letterpress studio at the University of Michigan. Led by Rebecca Chung (UMSI) and Fritz Swanson (Wolverine Press), a team of U of M students is working on a handset edition based on the G gathering from the second quarto of Hamlet, published in 1604 and conventionally known as Q2. In this gathering you can read what is probably the most famous soliloquy Shakespeare ever wrote: “To be, or not to be". In brief, the students are recreating the old printing technique of setting the type as a compositor would have done it in the seventeenth century.

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.