Category: News

Friends 2022 Annual Meeting

The Friends of the Michigan Tech Library will hold their 2021 Annual Meeting on Thursday, 21 October 2021 from 4:30-6:00 p.m. on Zoom. All are encouraged to attend.

The FMTL Annual Meeting will consist of a very short business meeting followed by a presentation by speaker Faith A. Morrison who recently retired from Michigan Tech after 30 years of teaching, scholarship, and service.

Uncertainty Analysis cover
Morrison’s new book

Morrison’s presentation at the Annual Meeting centers on issues addressed in her recent book Uncertainty Analysis for Engineers & Scientists (Cambridge University Press, 2021). Measurements form the backbone of scientific and engineering discovery and understanding, but no measurement value is known with 100% confidence: equipment limitations, random events, and calibration issues all conspire to make it difficult sometimes to interpret the meaning of a measurement. Uncertainty analysis is the process by which data-takers face, assess, and continuously improve the reliability of their measurements. Knowing at least a little bit about uncertainty analysis would be good for everyone—it would help us to better understand decisions made with numbers, such as those used to determine the healthfulness of what we eat and drink or the efficacy of medicines and vaccines.

Join the meeting from PC, Mac, Linux, iOS or Android: https://michigantech.zoom.us/j/86836422668

FMTL Book Launch: “Oil Palm” by Jon Robins

Please join us on Wednesday July 7 from noon–1pm for a virtual book launch of Oil Palm: A Global History (UNC Press) by Jonathan E. Robins (Associate Professor of History, Department of Social Sciences).

Register for the Webinar HERE

Oil palms are everywhere—grown in nearly every tropical country, they supply the world with more edible fat than any other plant and play a role in scores of packaged products, from lipstick and soap to margarine and cookies. And as Robins shows in this new book, sweeping social transformations carried the plant around the planet. First brought to the global stage in the holds of slave ships, palm oil became a quintessential commodity in the Industrial Revolution. Imperialists hungry for cheap fat subjugated Africa’s oil palm landscapes and the people who worked them. In the twentieth century, the World Bank promulgated oil palm agriculture as a panacea to rural development in Southeast Asia and across the tropics. As plantation companies tore into rainforests, evicting farmers in the name of progress, the oil palm continued its rise to dominance, sparking new controversies over trade, land and labor rights, human health, and the environment.

In this talk, Robins will provide an overview of the book and discuss his research process, which took him to archives and four continents—and finally back to historic collections on the shelves of Michigan Tech’s Van Pelt and Opie Library.

2020 Friends book sale is cancelled/postponed

Due to Michigan Tech suspending all in-person classes from now until April 17 and MTU Events asking all event planners to seriously reconsider holding their events virtually (not an option for a book sale) or cancelling, it has been decided to cancel the friends of the Library book sale scheduled for April 2-3, at least for now. As things evolve, we will look into holding it sometime in late or April or May, or even in the fall.

We wish you all good health and good reading in this time of social distancing.