Library Digital Magazine – Winter 2020

Welcome to the U-M Library’s digital magazine, which highlights stories from around the library, the library in the news, and upcoming events. A new edition is published at the start of each fall, winter, and spring/summer term.

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Remember 5.25 inch floppy disks? No? This early digital storage medium became obsolete in the mid-1990s, but the disks that remain are more than just artifacts. Find out how Lance Stuchell, head of the library's digital preservation lab, coaxes information off of these and other obsolete digital media — once he figures out which side is up.

Transcript

Photo courtesy U-M School of Information

Around the library

A centuries-old composition, brought to life

University of Michigan faculty members and students have breathed new life into a rare musical composition that has not been performed for at least two centuries.

Faculty and students at the School of Music, Theatre & Dance did painstaking work to create a performance edition of “Quando o bella Clori,” written by Italian composer and keyboard virtuoso Giuseppe Domenico Scarlatti (1685–1757). They debuted the piece at an event in the Hatcher Graduate Library in October.

The performance edition is based on a 1712 piece by Scarlatti. The handwritten composition has been part of the U-M Library’s music collection since the 1950s. It is the only known copy of this work, and was originally part of the private collection of Jean Auguste Stellfeld, a prominent Belgian jurist and musicologist.

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A woman standing at a podium, holding a microphone in one hand and gesturing with the other

Inside Brown v. Board of Education

Cheryl Brown Henderson spoke about her experience with segregated schools, and told the story of her family's role in the landmark Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education.

Henderson's father, the late Reverend Oliver L. Brown, along with 12 other parents in Topeka, Kansas, filed suit on behalf of their children in 1950. The case eventually made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in May of 1954 ruled unanimously that racial segregation in public schools violated the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, and declared that separate educational facilities for white and African American students are inherently unequal.

Brown's talk was part of the university's annual U-M Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Symposium. (Photos by Bill Bresler)

The Master and Margarita and the library

The Mikhail Bulgakov Literary-Memorial Museum in Kyiv resides in the childhood home of this iconic 20th-century Russian writer, most famous for his posthumously published novel The Master and Margarita (1966), a fantastical satire of life in the Soviet Union.

The museum holds a collection of Bulgakov’s personal belongings, including letters, books, photos, and heirlooms, toward “preserving the spirit of that time and recreating the atmosphere, in which Mikhail Bulgakov wrote his best books.”

Now, thanks to the enterprising work of a graduate student and an international collaboration, nearly 700 of these items are viewable online via the library’s Mikhail Bulgakov Digital Collection. The Mikhail Bulgakov Literary-Memorial Museum in Kyiv is the first in Ukraine to digitize and publish its collection online for an international audience.

Grace Mahoney, PhD candidate in U-M's Slavic Languages & Literatures department, digitized the objects while working at the museum toward a graduate certificate in the U-M Museum Studies Program. But long before this project, Mahoney had been nurturing a connection to Ukraine.

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Black and white photo of a young man in uniform; handwritten text at the bottom includes a date, 1908, and text in Cyrillic

courtesy the Mikhail Bulgakov Literary-Memorial Museum

Starting out strong

Olivia Chang won the 2019 Undergraduate Research Award for Outstanding First-Year Research Project for her research paper on relations among self-esteem, contingencies of self-worth, and disordered eating in college-age women, which is being developed for submission to a peer-reviewed journal. Here she shares her library research experience with Danielle Colburn, the library’s marketing assistant. (The interview was edited for length and clarity.)

Which library resources did you rely on for your research project?
At the beginning of the semester I met with Hailey Mooney, a librarian specializing in psychology and sociology. She taught me Boolean query language, and how to access PubMed, Google Scholar, and ProQuest, and equipped me with several search engine tips. With the library’s immense access to psychological research I was able to conduct a literature review on the relationships among self-esteem, contingencies of self-worth, and disordered eating in college-age women.

It became evident that no researcher had assessed how all seven contingencies of self-worth might be related to disordered eating in females. My research mentors and I thought that this exclusion exposed methodological flaws and potential gender bias — researchers assuming that the primary reason for eating disorders among women is that they base their self-esteem on their appearance. We had reason to believe that other contingencies of self worth, such as virtue, might represent important variables in understanding the association between low self esteem and disordered eating in college women.

As a first year student at the time of your project, how did you navigate the library and make it work for you?
I reached out to librarians, my research mentor, and graduate students, all of whom were so willing and kind to share their (much greater) research knowledge with me. I’d say that I made the library and this research project work for me simply by staying curious and open to asking questions and listening to what others had to say so I could build off of their knowledge and experience.

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Photo of a smiling woman with long brown hair

Photo by Stephanie Chang

The application deadline for the 2020 Pamela J. MacKintosh Undergraduate Research Awards is April 30.

Read more about Pam MacKintosh and her commitment to supporting and recognizing the success of Michigan's undergraduate researchers.

Beyond the library

CVGA in the news

A November article in American Libraries featured the library's Computer & Video Game Archive. The article addresses the goals and the challenges of collecting, preserving, and maintaining the playability of video games over a wide range of formats and platforms.

Film librarian weighs in on "Michigan's greatest movies"

Film Studies Librarian Phil Hallman provided expert commentary on the results of a Detroit Free Press survey that asked readers to vote for their favorite movies set in Michigan.

LSA Today highlights Zooniverse project

An article in LSA today highlights a Biological Station project that's using Zooniverse, a web interface supported by the Shapiro Design Lab, to unearth, share, and preserve data from more than a century of findings from student reports about their summer projects and experiments.

Photo of a row of 8 identical small buildings, with the trunk of a tree in the foreground and a paved path in front of them

Photo courtesy LSA

Photo op

With the Michigan Union closed for repairs, the class of 2019 couldn't access a favorite campus cap-and-gown photo op, so the library stepped in. We dressed up the front of Hatcher and welcomed all comers — friends, families, pets — with or without mortar board and tassel.

We'll be there again for the class of 2020, and for their families, friends, and supporters, on April 30 and May 1 from 1–7 p.m.

Photo by Melissa Squires

Featured blog post

Photo by Dawn Lawson

Head of Asia Library Dawn Lawson interviewed Yujin Choi, an intern who spent a year working at the library via a program sponsored by the Korea Foundation. The foundation aims to provide Korean students specializing in library science the opportunity to work at prestigious libraries in the U.S. and Europe.

Choi, who returned to Korea in December, gained real-world experience in a work environment that she called "truly international." Korea Foundation intern Seohyun Kim arrives in February.

Featured online exhibit

The Career of Rama: An Epic Journey Through South and Southeast Asia is an examination of the Ramayana, a sanskrit epic of ancient India that remains a literary force throughout South and Southeast Asia.

The exhibit, created by undergraduate Estrella Salgado during a 2019 Michigan Library Scholars summer internship, focuses on the epic's plot and characters, and delves into a few of its many regional adaptations.

A colorful image with multiple figures in it. At the center is a seated figure with blue skin, dressed in gold and wearing a gold headdress.
Painted image of a man and woman wearing gold robes, seated on the banks of a river, with a woman and a fruit-bearing tree in the background
Single panel of a comic strip depicting a woman wearing a blue headscarf and holding a diamond ring. The panel includes narrative text at the top and a dialog bubble

Current & upcoming

Check our Upcoming Library Events on a regular basis and sign up to receive our weekly exhibits & events email. Highlights include ongoing monthly events: Third Thursday Open House in the Clark Library, and Special Collections After Hours in the Special Collections Research Center.

And please join us for some or all of the library's special events and exhibits in conjunction with LSA's Great Lakes Theme Semester:

  • In the North Lobby of the Hatcher Library, you’ll find Creating the Great Lakes: Selections from the U-M Library. This exhibit highlights how living in the Great Lakes has inspired a wide range of scholars, writers, and artists. 
  • On display in the Clark Library on the second floor of Hatcher is Waterways to Motorways: Traversing the Great Lakes. This visual tribute celebrates the role the lakes played in the history and development of the region, and delves into the history of exploration and cartography in the Great Lakes. 
  • On February 11, visit the Special Collections Research Center between 4 and 6 pm for Cooking Around the Great Lakes, a Special Collections After Hours event to see a selection of 20th century charity and heritage cookbooks from the states surrounding the Great Lakes. 
  • Great Lakes area writers and Michigan Quarterly Review contributors will read for From the Great Lakes to the Global Water Crisis: Writers on Water. Join us on February 25 for an evening of poetry and prose, which will celebrate MQR's Summer 2011 issue "The Great Lakes: Love Song and Lament," and introduce the Spring 2020 issue "Not One Without: A Special Issue on Water.”
  • On March 10, Special Collections After Hours will present The Great Lakes in Children's Literature. Look at the Great Lakes region through the perspective of children's literature, with a particular focus on Michigan authors such as Tom Pohrt, Nancy Willard, and Joan Blos. In addition to published works, selected archival materials and artwork will be on display. This open house follows a lecture by Dr. Elizabeth Goodenough entitled "Growing Up Near the Great Lakes," at 3 pm in the Special Collections Research Center. 

Of course, we also have many books about the Great Lakes that offer a variety of perspectives on the region's history, people, industries, and environment. 

Photo of a woman standing at a podium in front of an audience

Photo by Bill Bresler

Café Shapiro

Student writers, nominated by their instructors, read their poems and short stories. For many students, Café Shapiro is a first opportunity to read publicly from their creative work. Join us for a reading, or come to all five. Five evenings in February in Bert's Lounge, Shapiro Lobby.

Dear Stranger

See Dear Stranger: Diaries for the Private and Public Self in the Audubon Room, Hatcher Gallery | Through April 12

Explore more than two centuries of diaries and diary-like documents from across the holdings of the Special Collections Research Center, ranging from privately emotive to publicly informative. These ephemeral writings embody elements of both private and public writing, and document lives and events that are often absent from the historical record.

Waterways to Motorways

See Waterways to Motorways: Traversing the Great Lakes in the Clark Library, 2nd floor Hatcher | Through March 9

This visual tribute delves into the exploration and cartography of the Great Lakes, and examines the modern role of tourism and motorized travel through pictorial and road maps. This exhibit is part of the LSA Great Lakes Theme Semester.

Support the library

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