2009 marks the bicentennial of the birth of Charles Darwin, one of the most influential biologists of the 19th century, and the 150th anniversary of his landmark publication, On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection. The Shapiro Science Library celebrates these events with a special book display on Darwin and the theory of evolution.

Many libraries will be closed for the upcoming university holiday break in recognition of Thanksgiving. Please check the library hours for this week and weekend to help you plan your library visit.

Do you surf on your iPhone?  Use your Blackberry to find books?  Find journal articles on your Palm Pre?  The University Library wants to know more about your use of mobile devices.  Please take our short survey (it'll take less than 3 minutes).

The University Library is pleased to announce that we have purchased Cambridge Histories Online, a digitized text collection of print resources. The content is full-text, searchable, and one may download chapters in PDF form.

The University Library welcomes Brian Vivier who joined the Asia Library on November 16.  Brian comes to Michigan from the East Asia Library at Yale University where he served as a special projects manager. He has a Ph.D. degree in Chinese history from Yale and will receive a MLS degree from Southern Connecticut State University this year.  At the Asia Library Brian serves as the Coordinator of Public Services and selects Western language materials on East Asia.

On Friday, December 11, 2009 the Health Sciences Libraries and the University Library Bioinformatics Interest Group are sponsoring a webinar presented by Peter S. Cooper, Ph.D., Public Services, National Center for Biotechnology Information. Dr. Cooper will present a brief tutorial covering molecular and literature database searching at the NCBI through the Entrez system and BLAST. The session emphasizes database integration as part of the NCBI Discovery system.

Thomas (Tom) Burnett, our colleague and friend, passed away suddenly of heart failure last week. The Library community is deeply saddened by this news and our thoughts are with his family, campus colleagues, and many friends.

"Tom was an extraordinary, gifted man who graced the Library and campus with his intellect, full engagement with life, and his sense of humor. There was simply no one like him,” said Barbara MacAdam Associate University Librarian for Public Services.

In an effort to reach out to the Ann Arbor community, the University Library and the Media Center at Skyline High School are partnering to provide their students with an opportunity to learn about conducting college-level research. Twelve librarians form both the Undergraduate and Graduate Libraries will team up to teach 6 different sessions covering U of M Library resources to approximately 150 students.

Mission statement: To be the primary academic publishing unit of the University of Michigan, with responsibility for the creation and promotion of scholarly, educational, and regional materials in digital and print formats. MPublishing commits to using the best emerging digital technology to disseminate such information as freely and widely as possible while preserving the integrity of published scholarship.

An article written by Laurie Alexander, Laurie Sutch, and Harold Tuckett
appears  in the October 2009 (volume 70, no.9) issue of the College and
Research Libraries News. "The Tech Deck:  Your Place for Project Support"
details the reasons behind the creation of the Tech Deck (located on the
first floor of the Shapiro Library), highlighting how this service promotes

The University Library is improving our self-copy services by installing equipment to accept your university Mcard! The equipment to accept Mcards will be rolled out to various libraries over the next several weeks. During this conversion process, you can use the "old" copy card at locations where the new copiers have not yet been installed.

You can use your Mcard to photocopy in the Shapiro Libraries and in the Hatcher Graduate Library!

The University of Michigan Press congratulates Elinor Ostrom, winner of the 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics for her "analyis of economic governance, especially the commons"! She is the first woman to win a Nobel Prize in this category. more...

The renovation of the Asia Library’s reference area (west end of 4^th floor, Hatcher North, between Asia Library offices and the stacks) starts on October 7.  The project will take about 8-10 weeks to complete.  Asia Library offices will remain open all the time.  Please bear with us as we make Asia Library a more welcoming environment for all library patrons. If you have questions about this renovation, please contact Jidong Yang, Head of the Asia Library.

The University Library offers many workshops designed to assist researchers in their work. The Digital Dissertation Workshop schedule includes hands-on sessions for Word, Photoshop, EndNote, blogs, finding grants, plus much more.

The University Library owns millions of pages of important content on microfilm, content which is not currently available in any other format. The Serials and Microforms Services department features four ST200X scanners which are digital systems to view and capture microform images. This technology eliminates over 100 pounds of power-consuming and heat-producing motors and sub-assemblies found in traditional microform reader printers.

The University Library is pleased to announce that all three campuses of the University of Michigan now have access to ebrary Academic Complete, a collection of nearly 45,000 e-books in a broad range of subjects. Titles are available from more than 150 publishers, including: Brill, Cambridge, Elsevier, John Wiley & Sons, Johns Hopkins University Press, MIT, Taylor & Francis, Palgrave-MacMillan, and more.

MLibrary launched its newly designed web site and library catalog today, Monday, August 3, 2009. We created this new site in response to comments from you, our user community. MLibrary's goal is to provide you with a web environment that makes it easy to find information and even easier to contact our librarian subject experts. In other words, we want to help you find more.