Library Blogs

The 2020 University of Michigan LSA Fall theme semester is Democracy & Debate: Speak, Act, Vote. My second blogpost surrounding the themed semester highlights physical and electronic books in the library about voting.

Academic library service portfolios are mostly a mix of big to small strategic initiatives and tactical projects. Systems developed in the past can become a durable bedrock of workflows and services around the library, remaining relevant and needed for five, ten, and sometimes as long as twenty years. There is, of course, never enough time and resources to do everything. The challenge faced by Library IT divisions is to balance the tension of sustaining these legacy systems while continuing to innovate and develop new services. The University of Michigan’s Library IT portfolio has legacy systems in need of ongoing maintenance and support, in addition to new projects and services that add to and expand the portfolio. We, at Michigan, worked on a process to balance the portfolio of services and projects for our Library IT division. We started working on the idea of developing a custom tool for our needs since all the other available tools are oriented towards corporate organizations and we needed a light-weight tool to support our process. We went through a complete planning process first on whiteboards and paper, then developed an open source tool called TRACC for helping us with portfolio management.

Murder on the Champ de Mars is part of a long-running mystery series set in Paris. A young Romany man approaches detective Aimée Leduc and says he has information about the murder of her father. As fans of the series know, Aimée has been searching for her father's murderer since the first book in the series. When Aimée goes to meet the young man, he is murdered in front of her eyes, but she never gets a good look at the killer. This book also tells of the tragic history of the Romany people in France.

The 2020 University of Michigan LSA Fall theme semester is Democracy & Debate: Speak, Act, Vote. Over the next couple of months, I'm going to post a series of blogposts showcasing some items in the Library’s collections which discuss the topics of the themed semester.

Shapiro Design Labs Media Production Rooms re-open for single person use, weekdays 10am-5pm, starting Monday, September 28. Reservations must be made 24 hours in advance, up to 2 hours per day, up to 14 days out.

We are very pleased to announce that the video of the Bookbinding webinar that took place on July 6 is now available. It was the first session of a series of virtual encounters on book history organized by the University of Michigan Library and Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Latinx Heritage Month is observed September 15th through October 15th. Celebrate Latinx art and culture by checking out some of the Latinx writers that can be found in our library’s electronic collections!

There are many beautiful and fascinating medieval and Renaissance manuscripts that can be viewed in the reading room of the Special Collections Research Center (SCRC). Out of the hundreds of manuscripts found at U-M, copied in many languages and representing various cultural traditions, including those of western Europe, Byzantium, and Islam, I will be focusing on Mich. Ms. 152, an extraordinary medieval manuscript containing St. Augustine's De doctrina christiana.

Source evaluation is an important skill in our information landscape, which is why librarians teach this concept to students during course-integrated information literacy sessions. As part of an IMLS grant, our research team is conducting a two part study to understand the impact of library instruction on students’ evaluation of sources. In this post, we discuss the use of a questionnaire and role-playing interviews to learn more about students’ confidence in their evaluation abilities.

The U-M Library launched a completely new primary website in July after 2 years of work. The redesign project team focused on building a strong team, internal communication, content strategy, and practicing needs informed design and development to make the project a success.