Library Blogs

There are many ways to record and analyze what is happening in the University of Michigan libraries over time. The more we understand how users are engaging with our spaces, the more we can do to meet their needs. But how do you get a handle on such a big question (library space use)? What data do you collect and how do you break it down?

Approximately an hour away from Seoul, surprisingly close to the border with North Korea, there is a magical place where books are said to outnumber people at a ratio of 20:1.

Among the author's papers housed in Special Collections are those of U-M alumnus and Ann Arbor native Nancy Willard (1936-2017). Nancy Willard (1936-2017) was born in Ann Arbor and is an alumnus of the University of Michigan and winner of major and minor Hopwood Awards (1955, 1956, 1957, 1958). Although best known as a children’s author and winner winner of the 1982 Newbery Medal for William Blake’s Inn, Willard in fact wrote for a range of audiences and genres.

A quick peek at two cookbooks from the late 1960s, one for Summer of Love hippies and another for their more straight-laced counterparts at home.

One of the great pleasures of spending this summer in the archives as a Mellon Public Humanities Fellow has been stumbling into and out of people’s lives, or the echoes of them left behind in correspondence, records, doodles, drafts, and other materials. There are a lot of recognizable names in the Special Collections Library stacks, but for every person I’ve read or heard about there are so many more who are new to me...

Part 2 of the Personal Digital Archiving Guide covers characteristics of digital file formats that you should consider when deciding how to preserve your digital materials.

Here's what the Shapiro Design Lab will be up to in 2017-18!

In this complex historical novel, Sarah Dunant tells the story of the infamous Borgia family of Renaissance Italy from several points of view, including the family's patriarch, Pope Alexander VI, and his two illegitimate children, Cesare, the leader of a mercenary army, and Lucrezia, who journeys to the court of Ferrara to marry the duke's heir, while grieving for her previous husband, who was murdered at her brother's orders. A fascinating new point of view is that of Niccolò Machiavelli, a young Florentine diplomat at Cesare's court.

As I thumbed through letters between Danny Kaye and his sweetheart Holly Fine, I couldn’t help but imagine the ginger-haired actor twirling Vera-Ellen in his arms and singing “The Best Things Happen While You're Dancing.” We often think about film as a moving media––people and objects flickering across screens––but film archives, like those of the Special Collections Library, contain the material, tangible objects that accompany the making of films. These materials tell rich stories!

MARC Authority records can be used to create a map of the Federal Government that will help with collection development and analysis. Unfortunately, MARC is not designed for this purpose, so we have to find ways to work around the MARC format's limitations.