Library Digital Magazine – Fall 2019

Among Randall’s many honors and awards was his appointment as Poet Laureate of the City of Detroit in 1981.

A U-M alum — he had a master’s in library science —  Randall remains a presence on campus. His personal papers are at the Bentley Historical Library, and you can access the Broadside Press archive, which includes many of the original, limited edition broadsides and publications, via the U-M Library’s Special Collections Research Center. The documentary film The Black Unicorn: Dudley Randall & the Broadside Press is available from the Askwith Media Library.

The nearly two-hour Anatomage demonstration was led by Dr. David Brown, Associate Vice President and Associate Dean for Health Equity and Inclusion at Michigan Medicine, and a flute player himself, who has long fostered his love of both medicine and music. While at the University of Michigan for his otolaryngology residency twenty years ago, he founded the Life Sciences Orchestra, an orchestra for U-M’s medical and science community that still plays today.  

A visit to the Anatomage Table was a natural extension of the program, with its emphasis on breathing and body awareness in flute practice and performance. Dr. Brown shared with the library’s media developer Kai Donovan that members of the group “were mistakenly under the impression that vibrato came from either the heart or the diaphragm.” Vibrato is a rapid, slight change in pitch when singing or playing some instruments. Dr. Brown used the demonstration to explore human anatomy and to show that vibrato comes not from the diaphragm but the vocal folds.

Both the students who visited and the staff at Taubman enjoyed the demonstration. The flautists left with a greater understanding of the role of anatomy in their music, and for Kai Donovan their visit was “the most exciting Anatomage demonstration I have ever been a part of, and I wish we could have a U-M doctor at every demo to help us explore and understand human anatomy and the full potential of the Anatomage Table.”

The Anatomage Table is available for anyone to try by reservation.

by Danielle Colburn

Because it’s run by librarians, the group has kept close track of its numbers since the statewide launch in 2010. By all measures its growth has been remarkable — last year’s drive saw 132 participating libraries, which engaged with nearly 5500 patrons.

Michigan Libraries for Life has been recognized for its work and contributions across the state. Since 2014, it has received funding from the Gift of Life Foundation, which in 2015 also awarded it the Platinum and Affinity Pinnacle Awards for raising awareness around organ donation.

“Libraries have been great partners in saving and healing lives,” said Dorrie Dils, Gift of Life Michigan’s CEO. “They’ve been enthusiastically educating the public on the facts of organ, tissue and eye donation for the past nine years. Thanks to this strong partnership, Michigan Libraries for Life gives hope to more than 2964 Michigan patients waiting for a life-saving organ transplant.”

Saylor couldn’t be happier with how far the program has come. “Delivering health care information to the community is always rewarding work,” she says. “And in this case it’s easy to imagine what a dramatic impact it can have, since organ donations save lives.”

by Lynne Raughley

Cong-Huyen and Kahn prepared the students to do just that by teaching them how to add content to Wikipedia and how to make sure their edits stick by using and citing authoritative resources.

For the next portion of the class, students were asked to combine visual and textual materials, be creative, and, sometimes, draw upon their own personal experiences to create a zine. Neis worked with Breanna Hamm, instructional technologist, and Evyn Kropf, librarian for Middle Eastern & North African Studies and Religious Studies, to teach students about zines and prepare them to create their own.

Zine research and making
First, a working definition: According to the Barnard College Zine Library, zine is short for fanzine or magazine; zines are self-published, and typically printed on paper and reproduced with photocopies. They are rooted in subculture, and often made by and for people in marginalized communities.

Hamm and Kropf began began by hosting a class visit to the Special Collections Research Center. With the guidance of curator Julie Herrada, students explored and got inspiration from zines in the Joseph A. Labadie Collection, an archive of radical and social protest materials from the 19th century to the present. Kahn and Herrada selected zines on Jewish perspectives, sex and sexuality, and representations of gender. Kropf offered insight on how to read and analyze zines by assessing how their physical characteristics — layout, design, and more — aligned with their content and message, to prepare the students to make their own.

Hamm worked with the students on the creation process and with Professor Neis on the assessment criteria. Given the nature of the class, they didn’t want to evaluate the zines on their artistic merit; and while they provided a rubric, Hamm pointed out that “zines are kind of anarchist in the sense that there really aren’t any rules,” so students were encouraged to push boundaries in service of the stories they wanted to tell. The students were graded on the reflections they wrote about how they approached and executed their projects.

The students visited ScholarSpace to learn about software they might use to plan and make their zines. Hamm talked about the history of zines, mood, and storytelling, and hosted four zine creation sessions to guide the students through storyboarding, composing, and building the physical zine.

The class concluded with a Zinefest in the Special Collections Research Center. Students brought their completed zines and presented their topics to the class, and to the librarians who had been involved in their semester.  

By incorporating both Wikipedia and zines — one very fact-based, and the other more creative and experience-based — the course offered students two distinct approaches to studying historical and scholarly materials, and new modes of processing and incorporating what they learned into their own work. Kahn said, “Both relied on students working within a set of boundaries and constraints, and required them to put those constraints aside when necessary. This feels entirely appropriate for a class on the history of Judaism, one that shows how Jewish communities navigated change over time, responded to and influenced the places they lived, and found many ways to ‘be’ and ‘do’ Jewish.”

by Danielle Colburn