Library Blogs

If you're looking for a fall course, a new topic for SAC 366 (sections 006/007) has just been added! This course is open to students of all levels.

The audience for children’s literature goes far beyond ages 2-12. The words and images of these books linger in our minds long after we’ve outgrown the suggested age ranges. Below are a few favorite children’s books from the staff of the Special Collections Library, featuring titles present in our Children’s Literature Collection. Celebrate Children’s Book Week with one of these suggestions, or share your own best-loved books in the comments!

Since Winter term is over, we wanted to pass along our list of the most popular games played in the archive during the Winter term. And since we're highlighting popularity for a whole semester, we thought we'd list the top 20 rather than just the usual top 10.

Watermark Wednesdays are back with Paschal Lamb motifs in watermarked papers from the Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

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 looks at a particularly dramatic instance of Shakespeare forgery in the late eighteenth century. William Henry Ireland, the son of publisher and Shakespeare collector Samuel Ireland. Samuel and William Henry Ireland had a relationship that was strained at best, and as a young man, William Henry wished desperately to please and impress the elder Ireland. And indeed Samuel Ireland was very pleased when his son began bringing home manuscript material in Shakespeare’s hand, supposedly from the home of a gentleman who wished to remain anonymous.

A day like today, on April 22 , Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra died in Madrid four hundred years ago. To commemorate this date, I have revisited our collection of early editions of Cervantes's works, selecting for this post the eighteenth-century edition of Don Quixote that played a major role to canonize Cervantes as a global literary figure.

Cotton Malone, a former navy man and U.S. Justice Department agent, now a rare book dealer, searches for clues to the disappearance of his father in a submarine disaster off the coast of Antarctica, and finds evidence of a lost civilization, possibly thousands of years old.

The first of a trilogy, this Jane Smiley novel covers the life of an Iowa farm family from 1920-1953.

Everyone who works in the library, including some student workers, uses the intranet -- that’s over 450 people! In preparation for a major Drupal update and intranet redesign, the Intranet Upgrade Investigation Team (IUIT) has done a ton of thoughtful user research to guide our work including a survey, open card sort and closed cart sort. The findings are informing our progress and helping meet the goal of making the intranet a sustainable and user friendly tool that everyone wants to use.

Please join Rebecca Chung (UMSI), Fritz Swanson (Wolverine Press), and Justin Schell (Shapiro Design Lab), for conversation about the Wolverine Press's edition of a famous sheet of paper: the G gathering from the Q2 (second quarto) of Hamlet, which includes Hamlet’s “To be, or not to be” speech, his repudiation of Ophelia with “Get thee a Nunry,” and his speech to the players, “sute the action to the word.”