Library Blogs

Due to newfound free time exclusively spent at home, bread baking has become massively popular as of late. Americans collectively baked enough bread to cause a national yeast shortage. For me, remote work at home led to research on Special Collection’s culinary archive; and, desperate to preserve my last packet of instant dry yeast, I decided to find out how bakers before us made non-yeast bread.

The Guardian of Lies is a Cold War thriller set in the South of France. A young woman, Eloïse, goes to Paris, hoping to follow in her brother's footsteps as a CIA agent. After a car chase, where her brother is severely injured, she goes home to her family's farm in the South of France, only to find that the area has become a hotbed of violence and political intrigue after her father sells part of his land to the U.S. Air Force for an airbase. And she begins to suspect her brother isn't telling her the truth about his activities. Can Eloïse find her way out of the web of lies and deceit surrounding her?

Enjoy some summer reading with the library’s collection of e-graphic novels!

We are very pleased to announce the recent acquisition of the first comprehensive treatise ever published about the illustration technique of woodcut: Jean Michel Papillon. Traité historique et pratique de la Gravure en bois. 2 vols. (Pierre Guillaume Simon, 1766). Papillon’s manual is particularly remarkable for including a fully illustrated step-by-step depiction of the sixteenth-century technique of chiaroscuro.

According to The Western Architect, four hundred and fifty million bricks were used in construction in Detroit in 1916. Among the brick buildings featured in this reporting is the Victor Theatre, located near the Ford factory that was, at the time, the largest manufacturing site in the world in Highland Park, an autonomous city in the center of Detroit. Today, this building is the main location of the Ruth Ellis Center, a nonprofit organization providing social and medical services to LGBTQ youth in metropolitan Detroit. While the exterior of the building is now unrecognizable – the façade covered over in the intervening years – certain interior spaces in the theater have been preserved: the detailed proscenium arch framing the stage-turned-conference-room and the upstairs dance hall where, prior to the novel coronavirus pandemic and enforced social distancing, youth gathered to share meals and vogue during the Center’s drop-in hours.

From the beginning of my time as a transfer student to the University of Michigan in the Fall of 2019, I have been interested in both engaging with the transfer community and improving the overall transfer student experience. When preparing for this big transition over the summer of 2019, I was most concerned with adjusting socially and academically to a new school. However, when I actually got here, I found there were many other, more hidden aspects of campus life that I had to figure out on my own. For example: Which buildings require swipe access? Where can I scan a document? What is the “UgLi,” and is it a good place for group work?

I think we don’t often consider how all these little questions and struggles add up to create the transfer student experience. Transfer student success is often measured by quantitative academic markers; students themselves are concerned with adjusting academically and socially. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that concerns about how to use the library as a transfer were far from the first thing on my mind. So, when looking for social science research opportunities this fall, I was intrigued by a position that entailed analyzing the specific library needs of transfer and commuter students. I saw it as an opportunity to engage with the transfer student experience through the unique, and often undervalued, lens of the library.

Ultimately, this interest led to me joining the Library Research & Evaluation team as a Research Assistant, as part of the Library Engagement Fellows Program. Through this position, I was able to utilize and strengthen my social science research skills through a project I am personally invested in and passionate about. Additionally, this position exposed me to library functioning and the specific resources offered by the University of Michigan Library.

The Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce a new online exhibit: A Menagerie of Animal Tales, curated by students in Dr. Lisa Makman’s English 313 course: Children’s Literature and the Invention of Modern Childhood.

May is Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month. Celebrate by checking out some of the library’s e-resources chronicling Asian American and Pacific Islander history and culture. There are a variety of formats and genres to choose from, including ebooks and e-audiobooks, biographies, memoirs, academic texts, and literature authored by Asian American and Pacific Islanders.

Announcing the publication of the Digital Archiving Research Guide, with tips and recommendations for organizing and preserving your personal digital files.

This project, supported by the Library Engagement Fellows Program, asked itself: what are the needs and opportunities within graduate curricula in the humanities and social sciences for co-curricular digital scholarship education that could be offered by the University Michigan library? This project defines digital scholarship as “Scholarship enabled by and shared through digital media and tools, that is able to ask new questions through digital methods.” While there have been various past and current efforts related to digital scholarship (programming as well as initiatives to improve resources currently offered), this research project sought insight from graduate students in particular. Insight gathered from this project would provide the library with information on what graduate students need as well as possible changes that could be made to satisfy these needs.