Library Blogs

From September 19 to November 15, the Asia Library (Hatcher Graduate Library 4th Floor North) will be hosting an exhibit that commemorates the 45th anniversary of the Chinese Table Tennis Delegation’s historic visit to the U.S. in 1972, especially to Ann Arbor and the U-M.

Join us at 4pm on Sept. 20 in the Hatcher Gallery. Dr. Camille Bégin, author of Taste of the Nation: The New Deal Search for America’s Food, will shape a cultural and sensory history of New Deal-era eating, illustrating how nostalgia, prescriptive gender ideals, and racial stereotypes shaped how the FWP was able to frame regional food cultures as “American.”

Ancient Roman detective Flavia Albia has been hired by palace officials working for the paranoid emperor Domitian to investigate a conspiracy involving a man who pretends to be the emperor Nero. Meanwhile, the newly-married Flavia cares for her husband, who's survived being struck by lightning but has never been the same since, and contends with a series of domestic troubles.

In honor of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, the Nineteenth Century Forum and the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan invite interdisciplinary papers that explore movement, mapping, or the margins within the late-eighteenth or nineteenth centuries. Please email abstracts of no more than 300 words to austenmaps@gmail.com by October 1st 2017. Please also include a paper title, your name, and institutional/departmental affiliation.

Highlighting manuscripts and early printed books from the Special Collections Library, our new exhibit Reforming the Word: Martin Luther in Context commemorates the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation. Join us for an opening lecture by guest curator Professor Helmut Puff on Friday, September 15 at 4:30 P.M. in the Library Gallery.

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...