Monthly Archives: February 2024

Celebrate Open Education Week 2024

During Open Education Week (March 4th – 8th) there are numerous opportunities to increase your knowledge of the exemplary Open Education work happening worldwide. Open Education is a way of sharing educational tools, resources, and practices without access barriers such as high financial costs or requisite credentials and affiliations. It is a philosophy surrounding readily available teaching materials and creating a strong community of support between educators.

A stipend program was established last year at UMass Dartmouth to fund the creation of openly licensed textbooks by members of our faculty. A virtual panel will be offered on March 6th by the Scholarly Communications Committee to showcase the textbooks that resulted from this program. The textbook projects are E-Commerce and E-Business by Shouhong Wang, A Guide to Analyzing Arguments in an Academic Setting by Jackie O’Dell, Joshua Botvin, and Yuan Zhang, and Women’s & Gender Studies by Catherine Gardner. Each author will give an overview of the book they created. All 3 books are freely available online through OER Commons, an online repository of openly licensed teaching material. This panel will also include a demo of OER Commons by Repository Coordinator Rachel Oleaga.

Register to reserve your spot!

Borrow a Free Mobile Hotspot

Use the Carney Library’s Franklin A50 5G hotspots to connect up to 15 devices using AT&T’s cellular network. The library provides unlimited data, and loan periods are for one week.

You can check availability for hotspots and other new/popular technologies on the library’s Technology Lending webpage. You can borrow a hotspot at the Carney Library’s 1st floor Circulation Desk.

If you have questions about borrowing a hotspot, please call 508-999-8750 or email libaccess@umassd.edu. Technical questions should be sent to libsys@umassd.edu.

One Click Access to Library Resources Using LibKey Nomad

LibKey Nomad makes accessing library resources a lot easier, especially when you start your research outside the library. LibKey Nomad is a browser extension that provides one-click access to full text library resources from websites such as PubMed, Wikipedia, and publisher pages. Check out the first minute of this short video for a brief overview:

The library has offered LibKey Nomad for individual download for a while. Starting Monday, February 26th, the library, in collaboration with CITS, will begin pushing the Chrome and Edge extensions to all university owned workstations. After the plugin is installed, if you run a search on a site like PubMed, or even look at citations in Wikipedia, you’ll see Third Iron generated links connecting researchers to library materials. You will also see links to LibKey links on many publisher sites, simplifying full text access.

Here are a few examples of how LibKey Nomad may appear:

Example #1: PubMed

Example #2: Wikipedia References

Screenshot showing libkey generated links in Wikipedia

Example #3: Publisher Websites

Screenshot showing libkey generated links on a publisher's page

In you want to install LibKey Nomad on your personal machine, you can do so at https://thirdiron.com/downloadnomad/#choose-browser. The extension does not require a login and it doesn’t collect any personally identifiable information.

If you have questions, please contact libsys@umassd.edu.

Now Available: Meeting OWL 3

The Meeting OWL 3 is a 360 degree camera, microphone, and speaker designed for hybrid meetings. It works with most video conferencing software, including Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

The Claire T. Carney Library has two Meeting OWL 3 devices for loan to UMass Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff.

Students: Stop by the library’s first floor circulation desk to borrow an OWL for up to 4 hours. You can use the OWL in conjunction with the display monitors in LIB-217 and LIB-311 to host hybrid meetings with classmates, companies, and more.

Faculty and Staff: You may reserve one of the OWLs up to two months in advance. The reservation period is for 3 days. The library is piloting the equipment reservation option with the hope that it will make the devices easier to use when hosting professional meetings. To reserve an OWL, call the circulation desk staff at 508-999-8750 or email them at libaccess@umassd.edu. Alternatively, you can reserve the OWL directly by going to the Primo record and clicking “Request.” (Note: You must be signed into Primo to request an item.)