Library Blogs

The concluding volume of Sandra Gulland's trilogy about Empress Josephine tells of her life during the time of Napoleon's empire and portrays her as a woman very much in love with her husband but heartbroken by her inability to conceive a child by him. He begins to listen to his scheming siblings in their plots to get him to divorce her and marry a young princess so he could have an heir to his empire. This trilogy, taken as a whole, is a masterful work of historical fiction.

The May display of Undergraduate Library books in the Shapiro Lobby focuses on exploring the state of Michigan. We have selected books related to local history, culture, and attractions. If you’re staying in town this summer, considering learning more about our state!

More on our adventure with recovering Zip disks!

Earlier this month, Special Collections was pleased to host WEMU news reporter Jorge Avellan as he researched a story for their "Hidden in Plain Sight" program, featuring Malinda Russell's A Domestic Cook Book. This unpreposessing little 39-page booklet in faded paper wrappers is one of the greatest treasures of the Janice Bluestein Longone Culinary Archive. Published in Paw Paw, Michigan in 1866, A Domestic Cook Book is the only known copy of the oldest known cookbook published by an African American.

What would you do with 500 blank postcards? For contributors to The Alternative Press, the answers varied. Some hand-wrote poetry on their cards. Some made images--by painting, drawing, collaging, or pasting photographs onto paper. Some embraced the postcard format, while others challenged it--for example, Carol Steen made all of her postcards in brass, a playful take on the form you could never actually use them to mail a message to a friend.

Design Lab Resident Connor Lockman discusses his work with machine learning and animal classification projects on the Zooniverse platform.

Design Lab Resident Connor Lockman discusses an online course he took on neural networks.

As the Winter term comes to an end, we like to take a look back and see which games were most popular in the archive over the course of the year. We take a look at our top 10 games over the Winter term, with FIFA being played about 3 times as often as anything else. We also have a few new games that have taken off, including Spider-Man, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey and the surprise couch co-op hit, Overcooked 2. Looking at our top 10 list over the Fall and Winter semester, we see some similarities, with FIFA taking the lead and Mario Kart making the list as well. In addition, Rock Band 3 made it on the list for the first time in quite awhile.

Graduating senior Meggie Brody shares what she learned from working in a variety of positions at U-M Library, and says, "If I can leave future U-M students with one piece of advice, it would be this: don’t be afraid to ask."

Design Lab Audio Intern Holli Konrad reflects on what she's learned through her work at the Lab.