The expansive space occupied by the exhibit “The Many Hats of Robert Altman: A Life in Cinema”—at the University of Michigan Hatcher Graduate Library—fits well with this Hollywood legend’s oversized talent.
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Time can fade our looks and make us less spry, but don't let it take your memories. The physical ones, that is. Get advice on saving your important documents, photographs and other valuable items at the Preservation Clinic at the University of Michigan's Hatcher Graduate Library.
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The University's Board of Regents convened Thursday at the University's Dearborn campus to review a selection of infrastructure and personnel changes. Among these items was the appointment of Information prof. James L. Hilton as the dean of libraries.
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"I was intrigued when I read about a new venture from the always-venturesome Michigan Publishing, the innovative library-press publishing partnership at the University of Michigan, so I fired off some questions which were promptly and helpfully answered by Aaron McCullough (AM) and Meredith Kahn (MK)."
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If the terror in Boston caused people to question the darkness of society, the Digital Public Library answers with the free, open sharing of knowledge that can enlighten and transform.
Our own University Librarian and dean of libraries, Paul Courant, is helping shape this vast initiative as a member of its board.
It's hard to believe, but in the early days of our university library, students needed permission to simply touch a book. It took more than 50 years to liberalize access, and that came after the University librarian and the University president at that time, James Angell, all but begged the Board of Regents to allow books to be circulated.
"We have to remember," President Angell said, "that the library is the great central power in the instruction given in the University, and that the books are here not to be locked up and kept away from readers, but to be placed at their disposal with the utmost freedom..."
Placed at their disposal with the utmost freedom.
Sharing knowledge with abandon.
That is the hallmark of great libraries, great universities and the graduates they produce. That knowledge is to be created, shared and celebrated, because it brings meaning and sense to the world.
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The computing interfaces featured in movies such as Minority Report and Iron Man seem futuristic, but they're available today and will eventually arrive in the workplace.
Imagine training public-safety workers on disaster response without putting them in harm's way. Consider testing a construction project without even breaking ground. Or what if a citizen could request and access county tax records while driving? Making any of these scenarios possible requires a variety of technologies, but they all have at least one thing in common: natural user interfaces (NUIs).
NUIs let people interact with computers through gestures or speech, and can tap facial recognition, 3D visualization and immersive environments to deliver hands-free services. The technology offers great potential for customer service, fieldwork, training, medicine and more, according to Ted Hall, advanced visualization specialist with the University of Michigan 3D Lab.
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The University of Michigan's John Wilkin, who also serves as executive director of the HathiTrust Digital Library, will visit the University of Oregon April 1 to give a talk on "Crowdsourcing the Public Domain."
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University of Michigan's Board of Regents Thursday unanimously approved the design for a $55 million renovation of the Taubman Health Sciences Library.
Plans include moving much of the library's print collection to other areas and making way for classrooms, computer labs and spaces that support group collaboration and facilitate simulation and other technology-rich assessments.
The conversion of library space, which primarily is used by medical and pharmaceutical researchers and students, reflects the changing reality of medicine and other health professions, U-M officials say.
"Medical education has changed dramatically from the time that I went to medical school," U-M Health System CEO Ora Pescovitz noted during the Thursday afternoon regents meeting.
The exhibit opens at 10 a.m. March 19 at the Duderstadt Center Gallery on North Campus, with an opening reception from 5:30 to 8 p.m. Exhibit hours after that will be 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and noon to 6 p.m. Sunday. The exhibit will be up until April 3. Most of the art is for sale, with prices running between $20 and $400. The show’s popularity has grown by leaps over the years. There were 442 visitors for the first show, while more than 4,000 visitors saw the exhibit last year.
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On March 19, the 18th Annual Exhibition of Art by Michigan prisoners will open at the Duderstadt Center on the North Campus of the University of Michigan.
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Innovative mobile phone apps created at the UM3D Lab in the Digital Media Commons took the top two places in the Fall 2012 Mobile Apps Challenge.
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Open.Michigan is a University of Michigan (UM) initiative that enables faculty, students, and others to find, use, and create openly licensed content and provides a space for them to share educational content with the global learning community. Incubated in UM’s Medical School, Open.Michigan now encompasses the other health sciences schools, the School of Information (iSchool), and MLibrary and has become a full-blown UM effort that collaborates with universities worldwide on open educational resources.
Key to all of this has been Emily Puckett Rodgers, Open.Michigan’s open education coordinator from 2010 through 2012. “Open education is all about transparency, collaboration, and participation,” says Rodgers, who became special projects librarian at the University Library in January 2013.
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Dean of Libraries Paul Courant tossed an academic journal on a table in his office. The earwax-colored front cover read: The National Tax Journal, March 1980. “Read that for as long as you can before you get bored,” Courant, a silver-haired man with a tiny earring in his left ear said, smiling. Like most writing published in the past 100 years, the journal was printed on acid paper, which quickly deteriorates. Its pages are already yellow around the edges. Courant said these pages will have the consistency of corn flakes in 50 years. The knowledge it holds, too, could evaporate like soggy cereal — and so could countless other tomes. And that’s just one problem HathiTrust tries to eliminate. The HathiTrust Digital Library, a four-year-old initiative led by the University and involving over 60 other research libraries, seeks to digitize the record of human knowledge.
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Integrate LibGuides into Drupal
You might put this XML to work on your site in a number of ways. The University of Michigan Library adds research guides to its Solr-powered search index so that they appear in search results along with pages on the Drupal site. With a little programming assistance, you could convert the content you want from the LibGuidesXML documents into an RSS-style feed, allowing each guide to be imported as, in essence, a blog entry. A third idea is to build a local database, import the XML data from LibGuides, and use it to present citations and links to the LibGuide from your Drupal site.
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Motion capture technology at Michigan 3D Lab (with video).
There is now an app for reading an ancient text.
The Papyrus App “Picture it: EP” allows one to browse the pages of the oldest existing manuscript of the letters of St. Paul.
Professor Arthur Verhoogt, Associate Professor of Papyrology and Greek at the University of Michigan helped design the app.
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You can now hold one of University of Michigan's most valuable possessions in your hands.
Well, sort of.
Thirty of the rarest, earliest leaves of the Epistles of St. Paul, dating from 180 to 220 AD, have been digitized and turned into an interactive app usable on iPhones and iPads.
"What's especially important is the direct experience with the ancient world," Arthur Verhoogt, acting archivist of the library’s papyrology collection, said of the app, called PictureIt: EP.
The University of Michigan has established a digital collection of materials related to the 1918 flu epidemic.
Called "The American Influenza Epidemic of 1918: A Digital Encyclopedia," it was created by the Center for the History of Medicine in partnership with the U-M Library's MPublishing unit.
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