Library Blogs

In January of 2016, Professor Susan Siegfried reached out to Pablo Alvarez and myself with a proposal: a class focused on 19th century color plate books, tightly focused on the use of original materials, with weekly meetings in Special Collections and out-of-class assignments, drawing heavily on the private collection of Dr. James Ravin, MD, of Toledo. Would we facilitate such an endeavor? Could we?

This delightful little book, which can be read in one sitting, is a diary kept by novelist and literary editor Diana Athill during a visit to Florence in 1947. She writes about the sights of Florence, the delicious food she ate, and the people she met there.

The first in a series of how-to guides helping you to preserve your personal files and archives!

In this post, student Eric Morgel provides a brief overview of Asa Gray's foundational purchase of materials for the University Library.

Looking for vacation reading? The popular Japanese novelist Murakami Haruki has published a new book.

A pop-up exhibit (or rare book meet and greet, as we later came to call them) is an informal, short-term display of Special Collections materials. We take our items outside of the Reading Room because we want as many people as possible to engage with our collections and ask our staff questions. This year, we held six of these exhibits in three locations within the Hatcher & Shapiro Libraries and we're excited to tell you what we've learned from a year of ephemeral events.

The Michigan Daily Digital Archives is a joint collaboration between the University of Michigan Library IT division, Michigan Daily, and the Bentley Historical Library. The Michigan Daily Digital Archives provides searchable access to over 300 volumes, 23,000 issues of digitized student newspaper, from 1891 through 2014. New volumes of the newspaper will be added in the future as they become available. The Library IT team developed a robust discovery interface for the archives. The team made the choice of building a discovery system instead of using an out of the box application or vended solutions. The development team followed Scrum-like Agile approach for website development.

It’s not uncommon for academic research libraries, especially large ones, to have multiple renovations that add a wing, a floor, or even a new building. The University of Michigan Library buildings on our central campus are no exception. Our undergraduate and graduate libraries form a complex whose structure is just that. Many times a day, staff members direct visitors, patrons, or even a colleague to their intended destination.

Chinese Dance: National Movements in a Revolutionary Age, 1945-1965, our exhibit on the history of Chinese dance, is receiving lots of media coverage.

April Blood tells the story of a plot to assassinate Lorenzo de' Medici, unofficial ruler of Renaissance Florence. Although nonfiction, it reads like a political thriller. The book is not just the story of the murder plot. It includes many details of life in Renaissance Florence, including the political system, banking, and the arranging of marriages.