Category: News

Donate your Books to FMTL

—We need books!—

Books, Books, Books!  Make room for new books on your shelves by donating your old books to the Friends book sale.  All proceeds go to help the Michigan Tech Van Pelt and Opie Library.

There are, however, things we do not take, because they just won’t sell:

  • CDs, LP records, VHS tapes, or audio tapes (cassette/8-track/R2R)
  • old, tattered, yellowed, marked up or damaged books
  • marked up lab manuals or instructor’s class guides
  • conference proceedings, magazines, journals, and similar things
  • outdated almanacs, travel guides, computer books and manuals
  • catalogs, telephone books, equipment instruction manuals
  • general encyclopedias or similar sets (unless of high quality/rarity or specialty types [e.g., a 3-vol. Encylopedia of WWII Aircraft])

If you have items that are deeply vintage (>50 years old), please contact us.

If you have only a few book sale donations, you may drop them off in the shiny new donation box located in the Library vestibule (between the glass doors to the left as you enter).

If you have a box or bag of books, you may unload them at the Library loading dock. Call a Library staff member at the Service Desk at 906-487-2508 to have someone meet you at the back door to help.

If you need help getting your book sale donation books to the Library and would like someone to come to your house to pick them up, call Steve Walton at 906-487-3272 or email Susan Martin at srmartin@mtu.edu.

Welcome to 2022

We hope that 2022 finds you well and prospering.  Just a small update on our plans for the year:

  • At the moment, there will likely be a minimal presence of FMTL during Winter Carnival. You may know that in years past we had a really hoping book sale and free hot chocolate in the library on Saturday (which this year is 12 Feb.). Even before omicron reared up (though it may well have burned itself out by Feb.), we had decided to follow last year’s procedure of a couple smaller book carts and to forego the hot chocolate and cookie table. We’ll let you know here if things change significantly.  But as far as we know, the library should be open for you to warm up!
  • The spring book sale is still Thursday and Friday, March 31 and April 1 in the MUB.  Again, we will update as things evolve this winter, but we hope to see you there!

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.