Library Blogs

On Friday, February 12th, the U-M Library hosted its third annual Douglass Day celebration in honor of Frederick Douglass, 19th century American abolitionist, author, and orator. This year the event highlighted the life, legacy and work of Mary Church Terrell with a lecture from Dr. Shelley Haley followed by transcription, digital art-making, and socializing over baked goods!

Several centers at the U-M International Institute have collaborated with University of Michigan Press and the U-M Asia Library received a Humanities Open Book program grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, enabling them to make 100 important backlist books broadly available again.

As part of Black History Month this year, check out some of the Library's streaming access to films by Black directors.

Join the Special Collections Research Center on February 9, at 4:00pm, for the second of our Winter 2021 After Hours events: "Broadside and Lotus: Black-Owned Presses in Detroit." Please register at the link provided in the blog post below.

February is Black History Month and the first week of February is designated as Children's Authors & Illustrators Week. Celebrate by checking out some of the work by Black children's authors and/or illustrators held in the Library's Children's Literature Collection.

The next entry in the CHOP Film Series is Last Train Home, a 2009 film that documents a couple embarking on a journey home for Chinese new year along with 130 million other migrant workers.

We are very pleased to invite you all to the third session of a series of virtual encounters on various aspects of book history. On this occasion,
our webinar is devoted to textual editing and criticism. Our speakers will discuss innovative approaches to digital technology and scholarship in the edition of literary texts, ranging from Chaucer to James Joyce.

The Computer & Video Game Archive (CVGA) has a dual mission of providing users access to our game collection, and the preservation of games for future research and scholarship. Since the CVGA has been temporarily closed to the public due to the pandemic, we have used this time to shift our focus from user access to the preservation portion of our mission, and have been discussing how to digitally image and archive our game collection.

I am very excited to announce the publication of the first volume of a two-volume catalog describing the extensive collection of Greek manuscripts at the University of Michigan Library. Authored by Dr. Nadezhda Kavrus-Hoffmann, this fully illustrated catalog describes the largest collection of Greek manuscripts in America, which consists of 110 codices (bound manuscripts) and fragments ranging from the fourth to the nineteenth century.

The Burning Chambers is an epic historical novel set in 16th century France during the wars between the Catholics and the Huguenots. The daughter of a Catholic bookseller falls in love with a Huguenot soldier who wants peace between the two sides. But too many people wish to continue the fighting, and the lives of the hero and heroine are endangered. There is also a mystery about the heroine's origins, and a murderous noblewoman wants to have her killed. Author Kate Mosse has a great love for the area of southern France where the novel takes place, and it shows through in her writing.