Library Blogs

We partnered with the U-M Library to help us find accessible foraging books and guides, as well as guides for facilitating inherently non-hierarchical spaces. 

From January-September 2025, we were excited to have the assistance of two interns. Latitude Brown and Andy Nakamura helped us improve descriptive metadata and content in several of our digital collections, particularly those that address potentially objectionable or harmful material. This blog post shares their experiences and highlights the projects they worked on.

The Indonesian Cultural Night (ICN) 2025, hosted by the Indonesian Students Association at the University of Michigan (ISA-UM) was truly a night to remember.

On Monday, August 26th, the first day of fall classes, the University of Michigan campus buzzed with excitement.

"Where do I belong?" This question lingered in my mind long after my conversations with Sisi, a 21-year-old Chinese-Spanish student at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF).

My research addresses barriers to accessing treatment for opioid use disorder (OUD) among women in Punjab, India.

A recent gift to the library brought a collection of remarkable maps, along with the remarkable story of the man who collected them.

Back in 1964, Dr. Stevo Julius (1929-2025) left his home in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, emigrating to the United States to take up a position in the University of Michigan health system. Upon his death 60 years later, he left behind a substantial legacy. Among the highlights: research breakthroughs on hypertension and metabolic syndrome that helped establish the university as a global leader in cardiovascular research; a research professorship in his name to honor these achievements; a thriving family and a scientific community nurtured over many decades by Julius and his wife, Susan; and a personal history of fighting fascism in his youth as a Jewish member of the Partisan movement during World War II.

The Song of Achilles is Madeline Miller's beautifully written retelling of the Trojan War through the eyes of Patroclus, Achilles' companion and, in this version of the story, lover. Miller writes about the two boys' childhood, their early training by a centaur, and the events that brought them to Troy. She also has much to say about how war changes people. It is a wonderful novel, and will stay in your mind for a long time.

My name is Qihao Liang, and I’m a rising senior in Sociology in the Honors Program. I am deeply grateful for the U-M Library Student Mini Grant, which supported my May 8 to 23, 2025 fieldwork in Taiwan for my honors thesis on investment and education migration between Mainland China and Taiwan since 2008. I also want to thank Dr. Liangyu Fu, Director of the Asia Library, whose research guidance, fieldwork planning, and safety check-ins made this work possible. Writing in mid-August, I see how being on the ground in Taiwan reshaped my project; embodiment became tangible (what Ruth Behar calls “the vulnerable observer”), bringing emotional resonance and my own researcher subjectivity into view. Stepping onto the island as a citizen of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) with relatives separated across the Strait, I learned that self-exposure, the experience of being scrutinized and scrutinizing, and the slow time of fieldwork with participants—walking, eating, talking, getting lost—led me and, I hope, my readers to places that Zoom calls, archives, and scraping Instagram, Xiaohongshu, or Threads cannot reach.

We are delighted to announce the upcoming opening of a new exhibit highlighting a selection of rare books from the University of Michigan's collections, each of which illustrates binding topics featured in "Suave Mechanicals," the acclaimed nine-volume series dedicated to the study of the art and history of bookbinding.