Library Blogs

Personas are employed in user experience design work to help design teams create or improve systems, spaces, and services with targeted populations in mind. Libraries use personas as archetypes to maximize effective library user experiences. This is the first of two posts about the creation and use of personas in the U-M Library.

In the first post in the Social Class in the Workplace Series, Sheila talks about multilevel code-switching, both what it is and why people do it, concluding with sharing her own experiences of multilevel code-switching.

The Big Year was an intentional find in the stacks for me. When reading for pleasure I often browse and hope to simply alight upon a good title; sometimes something else leads me to a particular volume.

It all started this summer when I decided to feed the birds...

It didn’t matter that I can just barely describe bird watching as a newfound hobby and can probably identify only a dozen bird species—you don’t need to be a birder yourself to be swept into the drama of the Big Year adventure. Obmascik traces the stories of Komito, Harris, and Levantin back to their childhood roots, to investigate what drives someone to devote an entire year of their lives to birding. The lengths that these men go to in order to chase down birds are incredible.

In the UMich Research Data Services (RDS) group, we see and work with all sorts of data. One particularly thorny variety is netCDF. In Deep Blue Data, we have been getting regular deposits of data in this format, and we didn't know much about it. We had many questions how do we open it, what's its structure, how do researchers create these files and why can the size vary so widely from 100s of MBs to 100s of GBs or even TBs? Jake Carlson, Director of RDS, and I hashed out the idea of creating "profiles" for file formats as quick reference resources for RDS as well as others in the data curation field to help us do our jobs more easily and consistently. So, we thought we'd pilot this idea by creating a “Data Curation Format Profile” (DCFP) for netCDF data files since it seemed like an interesting file format and we were likely to get more of them in the future.

The Special Collections Research Center is continuing its new open house series, Special Collections After Hours, and this time we're getting ready for Halloween! Join us to see the Skeletons in Our Closets on Tuesday, October 9.

Part two outlining our findings after discovering some moldy floppy disks.

The Special Collections Research Center is pleased to announce a new exhibit celebrating the work of Michigan poet David Cope. Drawing on drafts, proofs, and other documents from Cope's archive, this exhibit offers a glimpse into his poetic and editorial process. The exhibit will remain on view through November 30, 2018 in our gallery space on the 6th floor of Hatcher Graduate Library (South), adjacent to the Reading Room.

We'd like to share the details about a video game-related talk happening in the library next week: This presentation is an exploration of the intersections of video game building, meaningful learning, Indigenous and Western cultures through relation-oriented ontologies - rather than aspect- or object- oriented ones. From the tech that is used to the land and waters the event is hosted on - these connections matter, weaving networks of relations across digital and physical heterotopic borders.

The Fire is the sequel to The Eight, one of my favorite books of all time (see my previous review). Both books tell the story of the quest for a legendary chess set that once belonged to Charlemagne, and which holds a secret of enormous power. The quest is played out as a chess game with the characters as pieces. The Fire takes place thirty years after The Eight, when the daughter of the heroine of The Eight finds out that the deadly game has begun again.

Over the next few months, we'll be celebrating the 10th anniversary of the Computer & Video Game Archive. To help kick off the celebrations, we've decided to create a poll on our bulletin board that provides a place for archive users to share their favorite memories. The questions ask "What is your favorite memory of the CVGA?" and "What is your first memory playing video games?"