Library Blogs

Monday January 18th is Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Learn more and reflect on the life and work of Dr. King by exploring writings and words by the man himself.

Institutional data, collected by campus units to assist with decision making and organizational direction, can inform scope and provide context to library assessment and research projects.

This young adult novel, set during a yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia in 1793, seems especially timely today. Young Mattie Cook struggles to survive in the fever-stricken city after her mother gets sick. With the help of Eliza, a freed slave, Mattie learns to nurse the sick and help the children orphaned by the fever, and becomes a stronger person. The novel is filled with details of life during the epidemic, some of them quite similar to today's pandemic.

We are very excited to re-launch online our open houses in the Special Collections Research Center! As part of the After Hours series, we have arranged an extraordinary line-up of events for the Winter Semester. Before the pandemic, on the second Tuesday of each month during the academic year, we organized physical displays of themed selections from our collections. Now we are committed to continue this tradition of open houses in the virtual world. All are welcome to join us from the comfort of your home or office to chat with a curator and learn about our collections.

The Shadow of the Wind is a complex, multi-layered novel set in Barcelona in the 1940s and 1950s. A young boy, Daniel, the son of a bookseller, visits the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, an enormous labyrinthine building filled with books. His father tells him to choose one book and adopt it. Daniel becomes so fascinated by the book that he decides to read everything by the author, Julián Carax, only to find out that someone is systematically destroying every copy of Carax's books. Daniel decides to learn as much about the author as possible, and the story of Julián Carax's life becomes a second narrative, with parallels to Daniel's own life. This is a book for all book-lovers!

If your only experience with A Tale of Two Cities was of being forced to read it in high school, it's definitely worth re-reading. It's a wonderful novel set during the French Revolution (unusual for Dickens), with unforgettable characters such as the good-natured rogue Sydney Carton and the bloodthirsty, villainous Madame Defarge.

Between March 20 and August 31, 2020, the University of Michigan Press made all the titles in the Library-hosted ebook collection, UMP EBC, free-to-read. During this period, U-M Press staff gathered use data in the hope of assessing the impact of free-to-read content while informing the future business strategy. Three different assessment efforts are described in this post.

Thanks to a generous Korea Foundation program, Asia Library is able to welcome a full-time intern from Korea to its staff every year. These bright, motivated young people learn many facets of library work while here, making this a win-win situation for both parties. This year's intern, Seohyun Kim, kindly joined me via Zoom to talk about her experience, which appears below. She was a trooper in every sense of the word because she had been in the US for just one month when the pandemic hit. Fortunately for us, the Korea Foundation decided to leave the interns in place, even though they had to experience the internship remotely. Seohyun made the best of a very disappointing situation, doing library work that we were able to teach her via Zoom and email. She participated in our meetings fully and always appeared cheerful and upbeat, even though she must have been quite lonely at times in an off-campus rooming house and knowing that her parents were sick with worry. We look forward to welcoming her back sometime in the future, when no pandemic restrictions apply.

Did you know the University of Michigan Library has access to popular titles through OverDrive? Enjoy some leisure reading over the break and check out our ebook and e-audiobook collections!

This historical novel tells the story of Napoleon's stepdaughter, Hortense de Beauharnais, her disastrous marriage to Napoleon's brother Louis, and her love for another man. It provides an unusual perspective on the major events of Napoleon's reign.