Library Blogs

Talk and reception to celebrate the upcoming online exhibit "Jell-O: America’s Most Famous Dessert At Home Everywhere." Dr. Nicole Tarulevicz of the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania speaks at 5:00 p.m. Using materials drawn from the culinary ephemera holdings of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive at U-M Library, the exhibit explores how the Jell-O company’s early 20th century advertising used depictions of the exotic to sell the product to Americans.

The Digital Library Production Service (DLPS) recently did a thoughtful and comprehensive update of its web presence on the University of Michigan Library website. This post summarizes the process and calls out the value of having a web content strategist in the mix.

If you're a fan of NPR's radio drama Serial, we think you'll dig The Staircase.

Early 20th century advertising materials for Jell-O contain striking representations of age, race, class, gender, nationality, regionality, and other vectors of identity; whether self-defined or other-imposed. In January, we’ll unveil a digital exhibit, guest curated by Dr. Nicole Tarulevicz, on depictions of the exotic in early 20th century Jell-O advertising. There will be an exhibit opening and reception, with a talk by Dr. Tarulevicz, January 12th, 4:30-6pm, in the Hatcher Gallery

The Browsing Collection is the library's leisure reading collection. Check out the Browsing Collection's top 10 books of the fall semester.

This Wednesday's watermarks feature: angel motifs in one of the papers of a 16th century Turkish manuscript from the Islamic Manuscripts Collection.

Relevance is a complex concept which reflects aspects of a query, a document, and the user as well as contextual factors. Relevance involves many factors such as the user's preferences, task, stage in their information-seeking, domain knowledge, intent, and the context of a particular search. This post is the third in a series by Tom Burton-West, one of the HathiTrust developers, who has been working on practical relevance ranking for all the volumes in HathiTrust for a number of years.

Joseph McElroy may be the best postmodern writer you've never heard of. And the U-M Library has many of his patient, ponderous books.

The U-M Library has some great chess books for beginners and enthusiasts.

An undergraduate science experiment gone wrong turns two roommates into enemies in this fast-paced fantasy novel.