Mardigian Library

Extra, extra! Read all about getting UM-Dearborn history online

stuxbury — Wed, 12 Mar 2025 16:06:21 +0000

Extra, extra! Read all about getting UM-Dearborn history online stuxbury Wed, 03/12/2025 - 12:06

In 1965, a Michigan Civil Rights Commission hearing took place on campus regarding racist materials that then-Dearborn Mayor Orville Hubbard was posting on City of Dearborn bulletin boards. The mayor did not show up at the hearing — but he did speak candidly to the student newspaper.

In a Jan. 20, 1965 article, Hubbard admitted to putting the items on the bulletin board and called the members of the commission, “a pathetic group. They seem to be a bunch of dreamers with a budget of $500,000 of taxpayer money and a staff of about 40 employees who . . . are looking for problems.”

UM-Dearborn Assistant Archivist Hannah Zmuda has been looking through 60-plus years of UM-Dearborn student newspapers recently and this interview was among the many eye-catching articles that she’s read. “I’ve learned so much about campus and the community from reading the student newspaper. We have well over 1,000 papers,” she says. “We might see the past as a foreign country, but we can use it to see ways that student concerns are both the same and different or how they’ve evolved.”

Through a $25,000 grant from the U-M Inclusive History Project, Zmuda is working to make UM-Dearborn’s student newspaper available online and searchable for the public. She was hired in June 2024 and previously did archive work for the Theodore Roosevelt Center and the Wisconsin Historical Society.

She lists off university newspaper article topics she finds amusing — like student smoking rooms in the 1970s, classified ads promoting “reasonably priced” typists to write papers and student opinions about the library being too loud. “I’ve learned that students have been complaining about noise in the library since it opened,” Zmuda says with a laugh. “I guess some things never change.”

The Michigan Journal from Sept. 9, 1974

On more serious topics, student reporters met with divisive figures like Hubbard, attended discussions with two Watergate defendants who came to campus in the early 1980s and covered protest efforts around a Michigan House of Representatives bill to separate the Dearborn campus from the University of Michigan in 1970.

The digitization project has been in the works since mid-2024 and is scheduled to be available to the public by December, Zmuda says. The project will be featured at the IHP Summit, which will take place on April 4 at UM-Dearborn. It is a free event and the public is welcome. Interested? Register here.

Zmuda, whose three-year UM-Dearborn archiving appointment was made possible by a separate grant from the IHP, says she’s organizing the university’s archive — which is on the first floor of the Mardigian Library — and found several iterations of the campus paper, which started publication in 1963. It was called The Dearborn Wolverine in the early 1960s and then Ad Hoc from 1965 until it was renamed as the Michigan Journal in 1971. The Michigan Journal is still in publication.

Zmuda also found student papers in the archive that offered points of view or events that were not covered in the university’s flagship paper, such as The Black Emblem. Published in 1975, it provided more extensive coverage of marginalized groups like disabled veterans and people of color and highlighted more faculty work that promoted equity.

Zmuda says university newspapers give insight into the student voice that other materials, such as annual reports or Board of Regents meeting notes, cannot. “Those are important too, but newspapers were published so regularly — and they were intended to be ephemeral and fleeting — that you end up getting a lot more of a holistic look at a place and time,” she says. “Looking at the Michigan Journal, it’s the most complete and granular documentation of campus life that we have. I look at the Michigan Journal as being one of the few times that we have student voices in the archives in a really consistent, strong and expansive way.”

The IHP grant is also supporting digitization of Lyceum, the student creative arts journal that launched in 1971 and is still published today.

Senior Associate Librarian Holly Sorscher says the library is thrilled to be working on this project. More than a decade ago, before Sorscher worked at UM-Dearborn, the Journal was digitized through the HathiTrust Digital Library, a large-scale digital repository that is co-owned and co-managed by research libraries around the world and administered by U-M. But after the Michigan Journal digitization was complete, library staff learned that access to the papers would be limited. HathiTrust’s materials, which were scanned in by Google through an agreement during the digital library’s early years, fell under copyright restrictions set by Google.

A scan of the Michigan Journal cover from Feb. 23, 1976 that announced the opening of Fairlane Town Center.

“It has become apparent after many, many iterations of trying to figure this out, that all of those items that are digitized in HathiTrust were not available to the public and, if you did get access, it’s not searchable by phrase or context,” says Sorscher, who notes that the UM-Dearborn team has worked extensively with the University of Michigan Library Copyright Office on the current project. “We realized that the only way we're going to get campus history from the Michigan Journal out there is if we re-digitize the entire thing and put it somewhere where it's accessible. We needed money to be able to do that. Through this Inclusive History Project grant, we were able to get money to hire Hannah for a three-year term. And then, through IHP, we were able to get money to digitize again.”

Sorscher says the recent project has been a collaborative effort with U-M Library staff and a copy of the digital papers will be available on the UM-Ann Arbor Digital Collections Library. But the UM-Dearborn archive will have a copy of the records and the Mardigian Library will retain control and ownership.

Both Sorscher and Zmuda say they know the demand is out there for the articles and photos in these papers that document nearly all of the university’s history. They have gotten requests from athletic teams for old photos, alums looking for past articles and faculty members who are in search of news items for research purposes. And now they have a way to get that information easily out to the UM-Dearborn community and beyond.

“We want our students, alums and community members, past and future, to have access to this archive. We want them to be able to look back and check out the years when they were here and what was happening at that time,” Sorscher says. “We are grateful to IHP and everyone that’s been involved with this. It’s a project that’s been a decade in the making and it feels magical to know that we are finally going to be able to publicly share this amazing resource.”

Story by Sarah Tuxbury

U-M staff and students assisting with the project include Bentley Historical Library Lead Archivist for Digital Imaging and Infrastructure Matt Adair, Mardigian Library Systems Administrator Patrick Armatis, Bentley Historical Library Digital Curation Archivist Elena Colón-Marrero, UM-Ann Arbor Digital Content and Collections Director Kat Hagedorn, Michigan Journal Editor Kalaia Jackson, UM-Ann Arbor Digital Conversion Resources Assistant Keith Larsen, Stamelos Gallery Center Registrar Autumn Muir, UM-Ann Arbor Digital Conversion Supervisor Lara Unger and UM-Ann Arbor Digital Conversion Production Manager Larry Wentzel.

University History

Mardigian Library

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Wed, 03/12/2025 - 16:05

Through an Inclusive History Project grant, the Mardigian Library is digitizing more than 1,000 student newspapers for a publicly available and searchable virtual database. The project will be complete by December.

Assistant Archivist Hannah Zmuda has been looking through 60-plus years of UM-Dearborn student newspapers for a new digitization project. Photo by Annie Barker

UM-Dearborn is developing a new comprehensive campus plan

lblouin — Tue, 11 Jul 2023 09:54:05 +0000

UM-Dearborn is developing a new comprehensive campus plan lblouin Tue, 07/11/2023 - 05:54

Executive Director for Facilities Operations Carol Glick says developing a new 10-year plan for the UM-Dearborn campus, sometimes referred to as a master plan, has been on her team’s radar for the past seven years. But a series of events prompted them to hit the pause button a few times. Back in 2017, Dan Little announced his retirement as chancellor, so Glick said it made sense to wait until the new chancellor, Domenico Grasso, could weigh in. Soon after starting at UM-Dearborn, Grasso spearheaded a campuswide strategic planning effort, so again, it was advantageous to wait on the comprehensive campus plan so we could build around the strategic plan’s core themes. Then COVID hit. Then the University of Michigan got a new president — who is now overseeing a strategic planning and campus planning effort in Ann Arbor, with hopes that we can sync our campuses’ visions, especially when it comes to sustainability goals.

Now, though, all the stars have finally aligned for Glick to dig into a task that’s a “dream project” for her and her team’s architects, designers and project managers. In the end, she says all the delays were fortuitous, because so much of the broader visioning that informs how we design spaces has already been completed as a result of UM-Dearborn’s strategic planning process. “We’re really looking at this campus planning as an outcome of the strategic plan,” Glick says. “Our campus community has come up with all these ideas and goals and now it’s a question of how we can best design our physical spaces to achieve those goals. And because we engaged extensively with our campus stakeholders in the strategic planning effort, we can build the plan around their vision and their voices.”

So what can you expect in the new campus plan? Glick says look for two themes to take center stage. First, her team will be focusing on establishing a new center of gravity for campus around the Renick University Center and the Mardigian Library, which will both get extensive renovations in the coming years. The goal for both buildings is to consolidate core student services that are currently somewhat scattered across campus. Continuing a theme we’ve seen emerge over the past few years, the RUC will become the hub for everything related to student life, university events and enrollment services, including the One-Stop, student organizations, the food pantry, Student Government, Global Engagement, International Affairs, Veterans Affairs and Experience+. The library will become the center for core academic services, including Academic Success, Disability and Accessibility Services, ITS, as well as typical library access services. Both buildings will get several new social spaces that Glick calls “living rooms,” where students, faculty, and staff can hang out, work and collaborate.

One of the other cool parts of this project is a plan to transform the underutilized space between the buildings into a parklike setting for studying, socializing, relaxing, eating, tabling and community events. Glick says this outdoor renovation — plus a brand new main library entrance facing the RUC — will help connect the two buildings, giving the campus a central hub it’s never really had before.

The second major theme of the campus plan revolves around the changing nature of work and education. With more hybrid and online classes, as well as hybrid and remote work, Glick says we’re simply not using as much space as we used to, and the general approach for the plan is to consolidate uses into a denser footprint. Glick says this has two major payoffs. First, half-empty buildings still demand full-time heating, cooling and maintenance, so consolidating spaces helps the university’s fiscal and sustainability goals. “Also, when we spread our population around a larger space than we’re occupying, our campus loses that sense of vibrancy and activity,” Glick says. “And I think all of us want a place that feels engaged and energized by a community.”

Glick is plenty aware that talk of consolidating spaces can be a tricky subject for a workplace. “What we’re talking about really is a massive cultural shift. How we work and learn is changing dramatically,” she says. In general, Glick says they’re planning to develop space in ways that align to current and future needs rather than history. If you’re a staff member whose role demands being on campus every day, then you might not see anything change. But if you only come in three times a week, you might expect to share an office and coordinate schedules with a coworker. If you only come in once a week, your “office” might be a pack-in, pack-out hoteling space. In addition, she says buildings that house multiple units will have more shared communal and meeting spaces, to accommodate days when a supervisor wants everybody in the office on the same day. “The idea is that we’d have space so units could ‘peak’ on certain days, but not all units in the same building would peak on the same day,” Glick says.

One thing that’s a little different about this campus plan is that it’s being developed in a time of uncertainty. COVID taught us new ways to work, but what work looks like now is still something universities and workplaces are sorting out. Appetites for hybrid, remote, asynchronous and project-based courses continue to evolve too. And, of course, most Michigan universities are expecting to face enrollment challenges for many years due to a variety of factors, including shrinking classes of graduating high school seniors. As a result, Glick says her team is building the plan with more flexibility than they might otherwise. “We’re actually planning for multiple scenarios. So if we get a few years down the road, and we’re seeing more of a trend in a certain direction, we can adjust as needed,” she says.

"Campus planning is an essential process for any campus to examine the physical footprint, identify priorities and strategies, and develop long-term plans,” says Bryan Dadey, UM-Dearborn’s chief financial officer and vice chancellor of business affairs. “The campus plan is a key component for long-term financial management of the university to understand the campus needs balanced against our financial resources.”

Glick says the planning process is now in the data-gathering phase. There’s also a new campus planning website that will keep the campus community informed about the progress of the planning efforts and provide opportunities for community input. The goal is to have a final, regents-approved version by spring 2024.

Sustainability

University-wide

Facilities Operations

Facilities Planning

Mardigian Library

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Tue, 07/11/2023 - 09:53

The changing nature of work and education are prompting the university to rethink ways to optimize its physical spaces.

Recent renovations in the Renick University Center are a preview of what's coming in the new comprehensive master plan.

UM-Dearborn hosted its first public ‘Zero Waste’ event

lblouin — Wed, 25 Jan 2023 19:05:07 +0000

UM-Dearborn hosted its first public ‘Zero Waste’ event lblouin Wed, 01/25/2023 - 14:05

The opening of the new exhibition at the Mardigian Library’s Stamelos Gallery Center looked much like past opening nights. But if you looked closely, you’d have noticed a few noteworthy differences. The hors d'oeuvres menu was carefully planned to exclude packaging, like cupcake wrappers and dessert cups. Public trash bins were nowhere in sight, though recycling and compost receptacles were abundant and clearly marked. Hovering near each of those bins, six volunteer “waste goalies” stood guard to help folks direct their food scraps and recyclables to the right spots.

These subtle upgrades were part of an effort to make the exhibition opening the very first public Zero Waste event on campus. UM-Dearborn’s new Sustainability Programs Coordinator Grace Maves notes that Zero Waste events typically aren’t as absolutist as the name suggests. Understanding that a small amount of waste may not be recyclable or compostable, the target is often to divert more than 90 percent from the landfill. Even hitting that mark requires some careful planning. For the exhibition opening, for example, Maves, Art Curator and Gallery Manager Laura Cotton and Library Director Jean Song, who’s been looking for creative ways to make the library more sustainable, started by auditing all the consumables they’d have at the event. They picked menu items that emphasized fresh rather than prepackaged foods. They worked with the university’s longtime catering partner, Picasso Restaurant Group, to make sure they were covered on compostable cutlery, dinnerware and wine glasses. They double checked that the cream for coffee would be served in reusable pitchers rather than individual, unrecyclable creamer cups, and that the wine they chose had recyclable metal caps instead of corks. They even verified that the specific brand of dinnerware at the event could be handled by the compost facility they had contracted with. Song says the fact that Picasso already emphasizes reusable and compostable items made planning a breeze.

Maves says the other big part of pulling off a Zero Waste event is making sure that the waste that people are producing throughout the night ends up in the right spot. “Publicly accessible compost bins are not very common, so a lot of times, people may just not know what items are compostable and which are recyclable,” Maves says. “So, for example, compostable forks, those feel like plastic, so most people want to automatically put that in the recycling.” To help folks out, they made announcements at the event and included lots of educational signage. The waste goalies were the last line of defense. “I would say our volunteers were absolutely necessary,” Maves says, noting that folks needed direction “pretty much every time” they headed toward the composting and recycling bins.

Maves gives the first Zero Waste event high marks. The team succeeded in diverting 96 percent of the waste away from the landfill, and they didn’t run into any unexpected snags. Coming off that success, she hopes to support several more public Zero Waste events on campus this year, and produce a “how-to kit” for campus units that, say, want to make their next office party Zero Waste. Maves notes that food-based events present an especially good opportunity, as food scraps that end up in landfills break down to form methane, a greenhouse gas that’s 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide.

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Want to learn more about making your next campus event Zero Waste? Sustainability Programs Coordinator Grace Maves would love to hear from you. If you’re interested in other things you can do to make campus — and your life — more sustainable, you’ll also want to check out the Planet Blue Ambassador program, which recently launched on the UM-Dearborn campus. Story by Lou Blouin.

Sustainability

University-wide

Facilities Operations

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Stamelos Gallery Center

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Wed, 01/25/2023 - 19:04

The recent exhibition opening at the Stamelos Gallery Center diverted 96% of total waste from the landfill.

UM-Dearborn’s new Sustainability Programs Coordinator Grace Maves (center) was part of the team that organized the first public Zero Waste event on campus. Photo by Rudra Mehta

A cross-campus team is reimagining spaces in two key buildings

lblouin — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 17:18:29 +0000

A cross-campus team is reimagining spaces in two key buildings lblouin Mon, 01/23/2023 - 12:18

If you had visited the student organization space on the second floor of the University Center on an average day in 2018, Dean of Students Amy Finley expects the head count would have been “about two.” It’s not that we didn’t have lots of energetic students planning events, activities and service projects. They were just doing it elsewhere. The problem was the space. Tightly packed with gray cubicles and a few work tables, the student organization area looked more like the drab setting from the movie “Office Space” than a place where students could get together, discuss ideas, laugh and organize. Not surprisingly, when Finley and her team began rethinking how to better tailor some areas in the UC to student needs, this space was at the top of the renovation list. Based on student feedback, the student organization space was reborn in summer 2022 as the Wolverine Commons — a student lounge with an open floor plan, cozy and flexible seating, and lots of places to spread out. Visit during lunchtime today and Finley says you’d see the average headcount has surged to about 50 students.

The Wolverine Commons example provides insight into a key socio-architectural truth: Our spaces can either be a hindrance to how we work, live and communicate or they can facilitate exactly what we want. The tricky part for planners and designers is that our needs often change more quickly than our spaces. Indeed, how we work, study and communicate has changed radically in just the past three years due to the pandemic experience. To cite an obvious example: We have more hybrid classes, so students and faculty are coming to campus less frequently — as are staff, who are more likely to have hybrid work schedules. This creates new opportunities to redesign our rooms, buildings and offices to best match today’s needs. (By the way, this is also a hot topic for our Future of Work working group, which we hope to cover later this semester.)

Updating spaces at a university is a nearly continual effort, but two of our most important communal campus buildings are about to get a big rethink. In order to better serve the needs of today’s students, faculty and staff, a new cross-campus team is leading an effort to revamp key spaces in the Renick University Center and Mardigian Library, as well as the outdoor space between the two buildings. As a first step, a design firm is helping organize focus groups to collect up-to-date information about what students, faculty and staff need and want. They’ll then organize that feedback into a phased renovation plan that includes options for improvements ranging from “minor to major.” “You’re always trying to make the most of student tuition dollars, so ideally, we want to identify things that will make a big impact without a lot of cost,” says Executive Director for Facilities Operations Carol Glick. “For example, if you look at some of the recent changes we’ve made to outdoor spaces, Adirondack chairs and outdoor games do not take a big capital investment, but they can make a big difference in terms of quality of campus life. Moreover, we want to identify different phases of projects, so that as funds become available, including for capital projects, we have a blueprint for how we would want to proceed.”

What improvements the plan will include depends a lot on feedback from the campus community, but Finley and Jean Song, the new director of the Mardigian Library, say some needs are already apparent. In the library, Song says access to power is a big issue. “We have an older building that has electrical outlets that were basically designed to be able to vacuum the space,” Song says. “We’ve jury-rigged a lot of things to make power more available where people need it, but our students and faculty would definitely benefit from a space that’s designed for the ways people want to power their devices.” Another observation: With the rising ubiquity of Zoom and hybrid classes, Song has noticed people doing something that would have once been taboo in a library: talking openly on their phones. “How much sound leakage is now considered OK? If I’m taking a hybrid class and I’m doing it in the library for whatever reason, is it OK to just be blaring it off my device? So our norms and behaviors are changing, and we don’t really have spaces that are set up for these new needs.” Song says Zoom rooms could really help address this challenge. Another area on her radar: specially tailored spaces that serve students with unique needs. For example, she thinks a family study area, where children could play or do homework alongside a caregiver, could be a huge help for multitasking students.

Next door in the University Center, the revamp is already underway. In addition to the Wolverine Commons renovation, Enrollment Services is staffing a new One Stop in the UC, a sort of in-person triage center for handling common student questions. In 2021, Finley's team also launched the new Campus Involvement Hub, where students can do everything from check out board games to get information about student organizations. They’ll also be creating a vision for the outdoor space between the buildings — as well as the “prime real estate” of the UC’s east-facing first-floor corridor.

As mentioned above, the team will be collecting lots of feedback to make sure the improvements best match the current needs of students, faculty and staff. They’ve already been dialoguing with student government, and starting this month, they’ll be sending out surveys and holding focus groups with all three key constituencies, as well as prospective students. They also plan to hold meetings specifically with library and UC staff, to better tune workspaces to today’s needs. After that, the design firm will put together different options, eventually yielding an exciting new adaptation plan for some of our most well-trafficked spaces.

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Want to help with the UC-Library renovation project? The team would love to hear your ideas for how we can make these spaces better. Please fill out the faculty-staff survey. Story by Lou Blouin

Enrollment

Student Success

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Facilities Operations

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Mon, 01/23/2023 - 17:18

Times change, and our spaces often have a hard time keeping up with us. The Mardigian Library and Renick University Center could soon be seeing important transformations to adapt to the needs of today’s students, faculty and staff.

Be prepared to see more changes like the Wolverine Commons, a lounge area on the second floor of the Renick University Center that reinvented a relatively unused space. Photo by Sarah Tuxbury

Library helps publish Holocaust memoirs

Anonymous — Fri, 13 Jan 2023 19:00:24 +0000

Library helps publish Holocaust memoirs Anonymous (not verified) Fri, 01/13/2023 - 14:00

Kriigel first became acquainted with Gorman in the mid-1990s when the Mardigian Library began working with Prof. Sidney Bolkosky to transcribe interviews he conducted with Holocaust survivors. His 1989 videotaped interview with Gorman was one of the first interviews to be transcribed and made available over the Internet. As the project grew, the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive was established in the Mardigian Library.

Gorman’s memoir tells the tale of how she and her family survived the Holocaust because a Ukrainian farmer had the courage to hide them in his barn. As Gorman, her sister and parents climbed the ladder into a tiny hayloft, no one dreamed that this would be their home for almost two years. The space was very small with just enough room for a small blanket the family could lie or sit on as they picked lice off each other and whispered stories to pass the time. The farmer did his best, but the family’s health quickly deteriorated due to horrible sanitary conditions, lice, vermin and malnutrition.

Although they could hear the farmer’s children playing outside, Gorman and her sister Suzanne had to maintain silence so that the family’s presence would not be revealed. As the days and months passed, the family stopped talking and merely existed. When Russian soldiers liberated the area, the farmer told the family they had to leave. Unable to walk due to atrophied muscles, Gorman and her family crawled through frozen fields to join the soldiers. Sadly, Gorman’s mother was killed several days later by a stray bullet during an airplane raid.

As an adult, Gorman had to come to terms with the horrific experiences of her childhood. She became determined to share her story with others, especially school children, so that they could learn the effects of intolerance, hatred and racism on others. She has been working with school groups for more than 20 years. In December 2009, she received an honorary doctoral degree in education from Northern Michigan University in recognition of her work with students. She gave a moving commencement speech to the new graduates.

Gorman’s book is being published under the auspices of the ÿ�մ�� and the Voice/Vision Holocaust Survivor Oral History Archive. The book is available through Amazon.com. The University also is sponsoring Gorman and the book at the 59th annual Jewish Book Fair. Gorman will make a presentation on Tuesday, Nov. 9 at 11 a.m. at the Jewish Community Center of Metropolitan Detroit in West Bloomfield.

For more information, contact Barbara Kriigel at bkriigel@umd.umich.edu or 593-5614.

Mardigian Library

Off

Fri, 09/10/2010 - 17:52

Librarian Barbara Kriigel recently collaborated with Erna Gorman, a Holocaust survivor, to compile Gorman’s memoirs into the book, While Other Children Played: a Hidden Child Remembers the Holocaust.

Mardigian Library briefs

Anonymous — Wed, 11 Jan 2023 19:30:53 +0000

Mardigian Library briefs Anonymous (not verified) Wed, 01/11/2023 - 14:30

Kathy Irwin to become new library director at Mott Community College

Kathy Irwin, head of circulation, is leaving UM-Dearborn to become the library director at Mott Community College in Flint. Her last day on campus will be Friday, Sept. 24. We have no doubt she will be highly successful in her new position. Please join us in wishing her all the best as she takes on this new challenge in her career.

'Trends in Research and Teaching'

Trends in Research and Teaching is a new library feature providing links to articles that may be of interest to faculty and staff, including:

Using Library Experts Wisely (from Inside Higher Education)

Assigning inquiry: How Handouts for Research Assignments Guide Today’s College Students (from Project Information Literacy Progress Report: “Assigning Inquiry”, July 12, 2010)

New whiteboards enhance group study

Thanks to a generous donation by Student Government, the Mardigian Library now has six portable whiteboards on the second floor for students to use. The library previously had two heavily used portable whiteboards. Due to their popularity, Student Government offered to buy four more for the library. They were available to students the week of final exams for the winter semester. These six portable whiteboards, along with another wall-mounted board, make the second floor an ideal place for students to gather together for collaborative study.

R.E.A.D. at the Mardigian Library

Faculty, students and staff are invited to participate in R.E.A.D. (Read, Eat And Discuss), a book discussion group hosted by the Mardigian Library. The group meets over the lunch hour to discuss books selected by the participants. The following four books have been selected for the 2010-2011 academic year:

Sept. 28, 2010:
How Does it Feel to be a Problem? Being Young and Arab in America by Moustafa Bayoumi

Nov. 17, 2010:
Have a Little Faith by Mitch Albom

Feb. 1, 2011:
Still Alice by Lisa Genova

April 6, 2011:
The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein

Participants are encouraged to bring their lunch, and the library provides a variety of beverages. Contact Barbara Kriigel (bkriigel@umich.edu) to be added to the R.E.A.D. e-mail discussion list. Those interested can view a list of current and past R.E.A.D. books online.

Mardigian Library

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Fri, 09/10/2010 - 18:30

News from the Library

Create classroom and personal projects with Mardigian Library’s 3D printer

Anonymous — Sat, 05 Nov 2022 22:41:43 +0000

Create classroom and personal projects with Mardigian Library’s 3D printer Anonymous (not verified) Sat, 11/05/2022 - 18:41

The Mardigian Library is more than a place to go for information — it’s also a maker space.

Looking behind the front counter, between the movie shelf and the student worker station, a clear case houses a 3D printer: A LulzBot Taz 6 that’s ready to help you create something new.

Library Systems Administrator Patrick Armatis said that the library printer forms a variety of items — engineering class designs, personal crafts and educational models. He said all types of projects are welcome from current students, faculty and staff.

“3D printers are important to have on campus, a place where there is innovation, experimentation and practical application,” said Armatis, who said the LulzBot was gifted to the library from the College of Education, Health, and Human Services and the Hub for Teaching and Learning Resources so the printer could be located in a central space. “As these printers become more and more common in the workplace, we want our students to become familiar with how they work too.”

The library's systems department reviews all printing requests to scan the submitted digital files for any needed corrections. And, if everything looks good, they give it the OK to build. So start creating.

Get on the list.
Before your first creation can start to take shape, you’ll need to watch a couple short videos, read some 3D printing basics FAQs and pass a short quiz. Then you’ll be added to a list of 3D printer users, dubbed the “Mardigian Makers.” It’s a one-time requirement to help you understand the process a little better, Armatis said.

Know what you want to make.
If you don’t have your own design, Armatis suggests that you check out Thingiverse, an open source site where people post their 3D print designs for others to use.

The site includes designs for test tube holders for labs. A T-Rex skull (with fossil-focused lesson plan) for upper elementary classrooms. Raspberry pi cases for techies. And, for Armatis, there was a Voronoi-style kangaroo. The little blue sculpture now sits in the drawer closest to the printer and he shares it as an example. “As a kid, I collected toy kangaroos; I think that’s why it’s the first item that I chose when test printing. I got the file on Thingiverse and I was very pleased on how it turned out.”

Work out the details.
The 3D printer does all sorts of shapes and sizes, but it does have limitations. There are instances where you may need to be crafty to accommodate it, Armatis said.

Let’s say you want to make a model of Saturn for a classroom. Since the printer creates by adding layers, an item can’t have suspended or overhang design because there needs to be a support structure. So you couldn't print the rings of Saturn directly onto a model of the planet since there isn't something that would hold them into the air. But you could print the planet and the rings as separate files and put them together after printing.

Another example is that you can't make an object any larger than 230 x 230 x 230 mm, which is about the size of a soccer ball.

“There is usually a way to still make an idea work. If you aren't sure about something, you can ask us to look at your design file to see if any changes need made before the printing process. If there is a concern, we can also offer suggestions.”

Other before-you-print tips are:
• Choose only one color per file. There are multiple filament colors, but only one can be used per make.
• Make your letters or numbers at least 7 x 7 mm if your design includes characters.
• Download this free Cura LulzBot software program or submit your design to the library to figure out the cost. It’s a nickel per gram.

Print.
Armatis said the printing timeframe depends on what’s already on the 3D printing calendar, but items are typically scheduled to print within 48 hours. He said the printing process can take between two to 16 hours depending on the complexity.

“Sometimes small pieces take longer than larger ones because of the details involved. So you can’t use size to judge,” said Armatis, noting that the library systems staff can share an approximate pick-up time prior to printing. “As soon as it’s done, we’ll contact you and let you know that it’s ready.”

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Mon, 10/08/2018 - 05:00

The LulzBot Taz 6 is centrally located and available for all current UM-Dearborn students, faculty and staff to use.

Library Systems Administrator Patrick Armatis preps the 3D printer for its next project.

Anne Dempsey is your cure for ‘library anxiety’

lblouin — Wed, 21 Sep 2022 17:22:39 +0000

Anne Dempsey is your cure for ‘library anxiety’ lblouin Wed, 09/21/2022 - 13:22

Anne Dempsey has been a librarian for years, but she admits that walking into a big library she’s never been to before can still trigger a little nervous energy. If you can relate, you might be relieved to know that such a phenomenon is actually really common, especially among college students. It even has a name — library anxiety — and it’s been a subject of research for decades. Dempsey says students can experience library anxiety in all kinds of ways. It could be a feeling that the library is “not a place they belong,” or a fear about asking for help, or a sense that they should already know how to use a library. Even the worry that you have to be absolutely silent or a librarian might come shhhhhhhh you — that misconception is still hanging around too. For what it’s worth, she finds that most librarians are welcoming people who resist the stereotypes. Plus, the post-midnight crowds at her previous post at a college library in Ohio were anything but quiet.

It’s helpful that Dempsey can empathize with some of these feelings students have. As the Mardigian Library’s new student engagement librarian, it’s a big part of her job to help students get comfortable using an academic library so they can take advantage of all the resources that libraries offer. In general, she takes a pretty straightforward approach to that challenge: Instead of making assumptions about what students' needs, fears, expectations or misconceptions might be, she generally just asks. For instance, just a few weeks into her new job at UM-Dearborn, she jumped right into some workshops at Wolverine Welcome Day, where, along with some of her colleagues, she was able to chat with students and answer their questions. To her point, what they were curious about went beyond things she was already thinking about. “Several students wanted to know whether there were fiction books they could check out and read, just for fun,” Dempsey says. “I mean, my first semester being a college student, that wasn’t even on my radar. I was just worried about books I needed for class.”

Dempsey says a question like that shows students are thinking about the library as a resource that transcends their class work. Similarly, she was surprised by the students who had questions about very specific databases. And conversations with some international graduate students tipped her off that she’ll have to help acclimate students who are used to libraries with so-called closed stacks, a system where materials aren’t immediately accessible to the public and have to be retrieved by a staff librarian.

One of Dempsey’s biggest priorities is to make sure students know about the wide variety of services the library offers. Even though libraries have become dynamic multimedia and community resources, she says the idea that a library is “just books” is still super persistent. If you don’t know that the library also has Chromebooks, lab goggles and graphing calculators you can check out — or that your library account gives you access to a bunch of streaming videos — you’d definitely be missing out.

Dempsey comes to UM-Dearborn after spending several years in a similar role at the College of Wooster, a small liberal arts college about an hour southwest of Cleveland. She says her new home campus is already making a good impression, from its natural beauty (Dempsey is a big outdoors person) to the much more diverse student population. So far, Michigan has made a strong impression too. She’s already been to Sleeping Bear Dunes, where the wild coastline made her feel “betrayed by Lake Erie.” And she says her Detroit neighborhood is packing all kinds of perks she wasn’t expecting. “Detroit is amazing,” Dempsey says. “Any day of the week, I feel like I can go walk somewhere and there is live music. The restaurants are great, and there are people from all over the world. For sure, my family and friends in Ohio, sometimes they're, like, ‘Oh, you’re living in Detroit?’ But when they come and visit, I’m sure they’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

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Anne Dempsey is the new student engagement librarian at the Mardigian Library. Want to connect with Dempsey? You can email her at ademp@umich.edu. And by the way, the answer to the student’s question: Yes, the Mardigian Library does indeed have a lot of great fiction books just for pleasure reading.

Student Success

Mardigian Library

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Wed, 09/21/2022 - 17:20

The Mardigian Library’s new Student Engagement Librarian is helping ease the nerves students often feel about using academic libraries.

Photo by Rudra Mehta

Old, new, maize and blue: The new campus archive plan includes all

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 14:46:00 +0000

Old, new, maize and blue: The new campus archive plan includes all Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/08/2022 - 10:46

This article was originally published on October 7, 2019.

Civil rights activist Rosa Parks, poet Nikki Giovanni, President Bill Clinton and President George H.W. Bush have all walked on the same campus that you do nearly everyday.

Surprised? So was Librarian Julia Daniel Walkuski. While looking through campus archive photos, Walkuski says it’s exciting to see the number of prominent people interacting with students, faculty and staff during UM-Dearborn’s 60 years.

“We have so much history here. I can’t believe how many high-profile people’s photos and papers I’ve seen while looking through the library’s archive. Artists, activists, philanthropists, political figures — we’ve had the majority of presidents from the past 50 years here,” says Walkuski, Mardigian Librarian and newly named archivist. “It’s all in the campus archives.”

As interesting as UM-Dearborn’s history is, Walkuski — and anyone on campus who’s tried to find historic information — says it’s not always the easiest to find what you’re looking for or the circumstances that created some moments in campus history. With that in mind, she has a request to people with long-term ties to campus: “Please reach out to me. I’d like to go through the archives with you and hear what you remember about items we have in our collection.” She says the more information people share, the better the archive will be for everyone.

Besides meeting with people who have experienced campus life for decades, Walkuski has been busy improving the archive in other ways. Earlier this year, she researched how to make the items available for all, working with a U-M School of Information graduate student to develop a strategic plan for the archive.

The takeaway? Instead of grouping items by donation date, group them by subject matter and digitize. The campus archive is now in the reorganization process.

“I understand why the archiving process here was by donation date. Many archives do it that way and it works for them,” says Walkuski, a certified archivist. “But we have so many requests for images tied to a campus anniversary or celebration — for example Homecoming — that it makes sense to group materials by subject instead of going through folders and boxes in an effort to find information about the annual event.” In addition to the reorganization, she’ll create “finding aids,” which are documents that contains details about what materials — for example, speeches, programs, images and years of each — are included in the archive collections.

While looking through the collections, Walkuski has noticed that there’s a bit of a gap with items shared with the archive in the digitized age. So she’d like faculty, staff and retirees to contact her with any materials you have that are tied to campus events, research or experiences. For people to get the most out of the archive, involvement is key.

“Send what you have to me; digital files are fine. There is a bit of a gap in our collection today, and in the recent past, because we keep it on the computer and might not think about it. Or it’s not thought of as history because we are living it now. But it may be important when talking about campus in the future, and we don’t want to lose parts of the university’s story because documents aren’t tangible like they used to be.”

Walkuski says reorganization is only a first step. She’s also working with UM-Dearborn student Maggie VanBuhler to digitize the collection. With the collection size and reorganization, it may take a few years, but Walkuski says it will get done. And, based on suggestions from U-M Information Sciences, the library is also looking into content management systems.

“We want this information shared and the goal is to have the archive available to you right at your fingertips.”

Faculty and Staff

University History

Mardigian Library

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Mon, 10/07/2019 - 05:00

Mardigian Library is researching how to increase archive access across campus and looking to learn more about campus’ 60-year history from longtime faculty and staff.

Get fall festive

Anonymous — Thu, 08 Sep 2022 14:29:41 +0000

Get fall festive Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 09/08/2022 - 10:29

This article was originally published on October 9, 2019.

Fall is a classic campus season. Cool air perfect for college hoodies and a warm drink. Beautiful scenery with Michigan’s array of fall colors.

So in the words of the great Julie Andrews, here are a few of our favorite things.

Decorate for the season

It’s decorative gourd season, folks. Give your pumpkin a maize and blue twist this fall with some Michigan inspired art. Carve out a block M or come up with your own unique design to make your home or office ready for fall. Make sure to stop by Halloween Week @ the Library for some on campus pumpkin decorating.

Take a walk around campus

Fact: Campus is gorgeous in the fall. Take a walk outside to lower stress and observe the changing colors on the trees, especially on the trails near the Environmental Interpretive Center. If you take a colorful campus photo, make sure to enter it in our fall @umdearborn Instagram challenge launching over fall break!

Pick up a spooky read (or movie) from Mardigian Library

Go classic with Alfred Hitchcock or check out some more recent titles like A Quiet Place. Seen the Stephen King movie, but never read the book? The fall is the perfect time for a scare!

Enjoy a sweet treat

The secret to a productive office meeting or campus event? The food of course! Fall is the perfect time to enjoy cider and donuts at a campus event — word is they'll be at Oct. 21's Conversation with the Chancellor. Or keep it basic and stop by Starbucks for a pumpkin spice latte.

Treat yourself to some new UM-Dearborn outerwear

Now that summer in officially in our rear window (we had to work in another Hitchcock mention), it’s time to layer up when heading outside. Pick up a warm Michigan hoodie or wrap yourself in a maize and blue scarf.

Rock out for game day

Get ready to cheer on your favorite UM-Dearborn athletics team and root for Michigan Football with this game day Spotify playlist by University of Michigan. Remember, UM-Dearborn athletics events are free for UM-Dearborn students, faculty and staff and UM-Dearborn students are eligible to purchase season football tickets in Ann Arbor.

Campus Life

Athletics

Environmental Interpretive Center

Mardigian Library

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Wed, 10/09/2019 - 05:00

Whether you need a good fright or cozy comforts, UM-Dearborn in autumn is a-maize-ing. Here are campus suggestions on how to get the most out of fall.