Library Blogs

July 30th is International Day of Friendship. Check out these OverDrive titles on friendship: works that share the joys and challenges of staying connected, nurturing friendships, and creating community.

As a Classical Civilization major, completing a project about modern Greece presented a few unexpected challenges. However, the skills I learned while helping to create our exhibit were invaluable, and it's given me a new appreciation not only for Greece in all of its forms, but also for all of the work that librarians do.

When I applied to the Michigan Library Scholars program to work for the “A Survey of Global Open Access Policies” project, I took it as an opportunity to learn more about a particular side of publishing and law that I didn’t know much about. As someone who is double majoring in Political Science and Creative Writing & Literature, I have always been interested in how the law interacts with people’s creations — regardless of whether those creations are novels, pieces of artwork, or video games. For some reason, though, I’d never considered works of research under the same umbrella. Through this project, I’ve learned about the importance of open access policies and how they fuel innovation and generate new knowledge.

Michigan Library Scholar Madelin Chau reflects on her experiences over the summer of learning about the importance of open access and working to make open access policies more accessible to the public. Through this internship, Madelin gained important transferrable skills, networked with various library professionals, and gained a broader perspective of her career goals.

I always knew my grandfather could speak this odd sounding language, an ancient Spanish dialect that sounded like a mix of Spanish and Hebrew, both of which I was familiar with growing up Jewish in Southern Arizona. I knew that this was his first language, but I did not know much more than that about his heritage–my own heritage–until I became a part of the Michigan Library Scholars. These past few months have allowed me to learn more about my roots than I had ever imagined I would know.

Being a new transfer student, I was intimidated at first by the scope of the University of Michigan and its library, but when I heard that I could have the chance to work on an exhibit based on the Greek War of Independence through the Michigan Library Scholars Program, it was an opportunity I simply couldn't pass up. Not only was my experience one of learning, but also one of fun, as well as growth as a student and a professional.

Digital Content & Collections (DCC) relies on content and subject experts to bring us new digital collections.From July 2018 to Jun 2019, our digital collections received 67.9 million views. During the pandemic, when there was an increased need for digital resources, usage of the digital collections jumped to 86.5 million views (July 2019-Jun 2020) and 89 million views (July 2020-June 2021). Thank you to the many people, too numerous to reasonably list here, who are involved not just in the creation of these digital collections but in the continued maintenance of these and hundreds of other digital collections that reach users around the world to advance research and provide access to materials.

Enjoy some summer rest and relaxation reading with these newly acquired titles in OverDrive.

Directed by a master of the Yugoslov Black Wave movement, Marble Ass explores LGBTQ experience—in a part of Eastern Europe, moreover, often very hostile to non-normative identities and lifestyles—with an empathy and dignity rather ahead of its time. The film is also just a boisterous, darkly funny, and very satisfying watch.

In Blood Sisters, historian Marilyn Yalom tells the story of the French Revolution through the perspective of women’s memoirs. She studied the memoirs of over eighty women, of various ages and social classes, who lived through the French Revolution. Many of them were aristocratic or upper-class women, because they were more likely to be literate, but she also writes about memoirs by poor or working-class women that were dictated to someone else. All of the memoirs make for compelling stories.