Better browsing - getting the most from Edge and Chrome
The default browsing experience offered by modern browsers isn't for everyone. Bright, cluttered screens with unnecessary images and adverts can make web content unreadable for many people. Happily, for many websites, you can customise the look and feel with a couple of mouse clicks in modern browsers.
Both Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome come bundled with features and free downloadable extensions that can turn your web browser into a screen reader, strip visually cluttered webpages back to simple text in your preferred font and colour scheme, and help you navigate and speed read pages with ease, and that's without using their built-in AI to translate, summarise or simplify page content.
If you are preparing to come to university or looking to apply through clearing, it is never too soon to think about what additional needs you might have. There are lots of ways the University Library can help you to learn and thrive academically and in your career if you have found struggling to read the printed word holds you back. Whether you have physical difficulty reading books, have a visual impairment, or have dyslexia or some other diverse neurotype that makes reading harder, your friendly library team is here to help!
A tale of African diaspora, self-discovery, and football
Alumnus and author Forence Mukiria presents her debut novel about a boy from a Maasai village in Africa selected for a football scholarship who travels to Manchester, experiencing culture shock, technological wonders, and a journey of self-discovery along the way. If you enjoy the preview, you can find copies of Florence's book to borrow and enjoy now in the Library.
Three Wagner operas as you've never seen them before
The latest exhibition from our Rare Books collection is now on display up the wooden stairs on the first floor of the Library. On display now on the first floor Library landing showcases the poetic interpretation of three of Wagner's operas by Irish poet, critic, and journalist Thomas William Hazen Rolleston, illustrated by the prolific American-Hungarian artist Willy Pogány.
These books are just a few of the many wonderful illustrated books and works of graphic art, architectural imagination, natural history illustration and more that are here for you to request, use in the Library and photograph for use in your work. Preservation concerns force us to keep them stored under controlled conditions, and we absolutely love it when students use these rare and fascinating works of literature, architecture, design and illustration to delve more deeply into their subjects. Ask us about what rare books we have for your subject!
Between silence and legibility: Queer female desire in Early Modern England
Now showing in the Library Atrium this LGBTQ+ History Month, History student Megan Conway presents an exhibition inquiring into the History of women who loved other women. Seen, suspected, imagined, and feared, the patriarchal fixation on the centrality of men left the love between women inadmissible to recorded History and absent from criminal law. While Medicine pathologised female sensuality, the Establishment failed to label and contain that which it feared, which was woven playfully and provocatively through art, performance, and literature. This display reflects on the instability on the edge of History's lens, recounting what happens to those who live on the fringes of what is admissible to contemporary understanding - the "space where intimacy flickers into view before disappearing again".
