Title: History Helping Science in the Quinebaug River Study
Presenter: Dr. Neil Fennessey, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering
Date: Wednesday, April 14th
Time: Noon to 1 PM
Location: Library Browsing Area

A Carney Library/Faculty Senate Brown Bag Lecture

The construction of an electric power-plant in central Massachusetts worried state and federal environmental regulators. Already concerned about how the Quinebaug river might be impacted during sustained dry spells by US Army Corps of Engineers flood control dam operations, regulators and environmentalists alike felt the power plant would make things much worse for the aquatic ecosystem. A historical study of how the river was developed by the early textile industry combined with a study of how the river flows with and without dams cleared up important misunderstandings.

Contact Matt Sylvain (x8682 or msylvain@umassd.edu) for more information.

Image from: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USACE_Westville_Lake_and_Dam.jpg

What: A Book Talk and Slide Presentation on the Portuguese Community of San Diego by Donna Alves-Calhoun

When: Thursday, March 25, 2010 from 12:30 to 1:30 P.M.

Where: Prince Henry Society Reading Room of the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, located in the Claire T. Carney Library

FREE – Open to the public.

This presentation by Donna Alves Calhoun, based on her book The Portuguese Community of San Diego, takes us back to the roots of the Portuguese settlement in the early 1900s at La Playa, on the edge of Point Loma, in the city of San Diego, California. There, immigrants from continental Portugal, the Azores and the Madeira Islands began a new life in the New World more than one hundred years ago. Along with their sea-faring traditions, they brought their unique folklore and customs.  They distinguished themselves in the fishing industry, built churches and halls, and celebrated the Feast of Holy Spirit in the streets of their new homeland.  Today, close to 20,000 persons of Portuguese heritage still call San Diego County home and many still live in Point Loma.

Author Donna Calhoun is a second-generation Portuguese born in Point Loma. Currently, she is a director at the Portuguese Historical Center in San Diego, an organization founded in 1977 for the purpose of educating people about the role of the Portuguese in the history of San Diego and preserving Portuguese culture and history.

Organized by the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, in collaboration with the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture and the Claire T. Carney Library.

For directions to the UMass Dartmouth campus, see https://www.umassd.edu/vtour/.

Parking Available in Parking Lot 13.

For more information:
Contact: Gloria de Sá, Faculty Director Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives
Phone: 508-910-6888
Email: mdesa@umassd.edu

What: End of Semester Open House and opening of the Traditional Portuguese Presépio Exhibit
Where: Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives
When: December 3rd 2009, 4-6pm

Presentations will be given by:

• Roberto Medeiros, Associação Cultural e Solidária Mosaico
• Fr. Tim Goldrick, Friends of the Crèche

Sponsored by Associação Cultural e Solidária Mosaico

What: A reception to celebrate the digitization of Sherif D. El Wakil’s Processes and Design for Manufacturing
When: Monday November 30, 2009 from 2:00 to 4:00 PM
Where: Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, Claire T. Carney Library (East side of)
Note: Visitors should use parking lot 13.

Digitization of El Wakil Text  Processes and Design for Manufacturing To Be Recognized

The Archives and Special Collections of the Claire T. Carney Library, in conjunction with the College of Engineering, will host a reception to celebrate the digitization of Processes and Design for Manufacturing by Sherif D. El Wakil on Monday November 30, 2009 from 2:00 to 4:00 PM in the Prince Henry Society Reading Room of the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives.

The second edition of this text, published in 2002, provides “comprehensive and in-depth coverage of manufacturing processes from the standpoint of the product designer.  Reflecting a growing need in industry and education for ‘design-driven’ instruction, El Wakil demonstrates the importance of considering the selection of manufacturing method early in the design process, illustrating how the selection of method directly affects the geometric characteristics of products.  Beginning with a study of the design process itself, readers are taken through the product development process. Processes and Design for Manufacturing provides engineers and product designers with a solidly quantitative, design-driven discussion of manufacturing processes that supports a systems approach to manufacturing.”

El Wakil has generously allowed the Claire T. Carney Library to digitize and make its content available  free of charge, through the Internet Archive (https://www.archive.org).  As a member of the Boston Library Consortium, the library has contributed 381 titles to the Internet Archive for scanning, through the Open Content Alliance.  Most of the books have been out of copyright (pre-1923 titles), but a selection of important titles, including this one, have been scanned with the author or copyright holder’s permission.

The Boston Library Consortium, Inc., a regional consortium of  libraries, established a partnership with the Open Content Alliance to build a freely accessible library of digital materials from all 18 of its member institutions.  The BLC was the first large-scale consortia to embark on such a self-funded digitization project with the OCA.  The BLC’s digitization efforts have been based at the Northeast Regional Scanning Center, managed by the Internet Archive and based at the Boston Public Library.  By working through the consortia, costs for scanning have been kept low, at only ten cents per page.

The BLC, founded in 1970, is an association of academic and research libraries located in Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Rhode Island, dedicated to sharing human and information resources to advance the research and learning of its constituency.

The Open Content Alliance represents the collaborative efforts of a group of cultural, technology, nonprofit, and governmental organizations from around the world that will help build a permanent archive of multilingual digitized text and multimedia content.

The Internet Archive is a 501(c) (3) non-profit that was founded in 1996 to build an Internet library, with the purpose of offering permanent access for researchers, historians and scholars to historical collections that exist in digital format.  According to Brewster Kahle, digital librarian and founder of the Internet Archive, “Fortunately many great libraries are weighing the alternatives and choosing to go open instead of putting public domain material under perpetual restrictions.”

Of the 381 titles digitized from the Claire T. Carney Library’s general and special collections, they total 136,251 pages, and have been downloaded over 35,000 times.  Titles include early local histories, textile technology manuals, local city directories, and other rare books too fragile to circulate, but now freely available for researchers to access from anywhere with an internet connection.

Sherif El-Wakil’s book has been downloaded and viewed over 1,200 times in the past year.

Visitors should use parking lot 13.  The Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives is located on the East side of the Claire T. Carney Library.

Organizing and Preserving Your Family History
What: A Workshop & Presentation by Autumn Haag and Jennifer Fauxsmith, Reference Archivists, Massachusetts State Archives
Where: Prince Henry Society Reading Room, Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, Claire T. Carney Library
When: Thursday, November 12th,  1:00-3:00 PM
Free and open to the public.

This will offer tips on how to organize andforpaper records, photographs and other audio-visual material, and digital records. We will discuss the organization of records, different formats of photographs, the basic rules of preservation, storage space, archival supplies, and the issues surrounding digital photographs and records.

Presented by the Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives and the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture

Portuguese-American Writer Katherine Vaz to Speak at the Claire T. Carney Library on the UMass Dartmouth Campus

What: a Book Talk by Katherine Vaz, author of Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories, published by Nebraska University Press
Where: Browsing Area, Claire T. Carney Library, UMass Dartmouth (Park in Lot 13)
When: Tuesday, November 3, 2009 at 5 p.m.
Questions: Contact 508-999-8689 or email: fmpa-archives@umassd.edu
Free and open to the public

Presented by University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture and the Claire T. Carney Library’s Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives.

Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories was awarded the prestigious Praire Schooner Book Prize for 2008. The stories evoke a complete world, one so richly imagined and finely realized that the stories themselves are not so much read as experienced. The world they portray is Portuguese-American, redolent of incense and spices, resonant with ritual and prayer, immersed in the California culture of freeway and commerce. Laced with lyrical prose and vivid detail, acclaimed writer Katherine Vaz conjures a captivating blend of Old World heritage and New World culture to explore the links between families, friends, strangers, and their world. From the threat of a serial killer as the background for a young girl’s first brush with death to the fallout of a modern-day visitation from the Virgin Mary; from an AIDS-stricken squatter refusing to vacate an empty Lisbon home to a mother’s yearlong struggle with the death of her daughter, these deft stories make their world ours.

Katherine Vaz, a Briggs-Copeland Fellow in Fiction at Harvard University (2003-9) and a Fellow of the Radcliffe Institute (2006-7), is the author of two novels, Saudade (St. Martin’s Press) and Mariana, which was published in six languages and selected by the Library of Congress as one of the Top Thirty International Books of 1998.  Her collection Fado and Other Stories won the 1997 Drue Heinz Literature Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in The Harvard Review, Tin House, BOMB, Glimmer Train, Five Points, Ninth Letter, Pleiades, and numerous other magazines. She was on the six-person Presidential Delegation sent to the World’s Fair/Expo 98 in Lisbon, and the Portuguese-American Women’s Association named her 2002 Woman of the Year. The newspaper O Luso-Americano named her as one of the top 50 most influential Portuguese-Americans of the twentieth century, and she is the first Portuguese-American to have her work recorded for the archives of the Library of Congress (Hispanic Division).

Praise for Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories (from book cover):

“Vaz is a soulful writer who understands her protagonists’ complex lives, as well as the way religious beliefs can assert themselves most powerfully after leaving native soil.”—Publishers Weekly

“One comes away from these stories believing that it is possible to bargain with, sacrifice to, confront, divert, and even overcome adversity. In this wonderful collection, Vaz gives us characters who delight in the marvelous, which lurks, often undetected, just beneath the surface of our ordinary lives.”—Joyce Wilson, Harvard Review

“In Katherine Vaz’s new volume of short fiction, she demonstrates brilliantly that rare quality of truly fine writing—a deeply profound knowingness about the human condition. Our Lady of the Artichokes and Other Portuguese-American Stories will even more widely prove what is already clear to many: Katherine Vaz is a master of the short story.”—Robert Olen Butler, author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain

“Katherine Vaz is an old-fashioned storyteller in the best sense. Her work is sensual, rich in detail and layered history. Her stories overflow with incident and feeling. Other writers present fruit plates. Vaz serves cornucopias.”—Allegra Goodman, author of Intuition and Kaaterskill Falls

“Katherine Vaz captures brilliantly the tragicomedy of people caught between ancient superstitions and modern values, people longing to cross over from one culture to another, from loneliness to love, from folly to grace. Her stories glow with a fairy-tale magic, yet they also feel uniquely and delightfully new.”—Julia Glass, author of Three Junes and The Whole World Over

Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, UMass Dartmouth
Prof. Frank F. Sousa, Director
https://www.portstudies.umassd.edu

Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, Claire T. Carney Library, UMass Dartmouth
Prof. Gloria de Sa, Faculty Director
Sonia Pacheo, Archivist, Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives
https://www.lib.umassd.edu/archives/paa/paa.html

Finding your Portuguese Ancestors: A Genealogy Workshop
Workshop Presented By Professional Genealogists Cheri Mello and George Pacheco

When: October 31st, from 9:30 AM to 3:00 P.M.
Where: Prince Henry Society Reading Room, Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives, Claire T. Carney Library
University of Massachusetts Dartmouth

This workshop will teach you how to research your family tree using sources from the United States, Portugal and Cape Verde.

Cheri Mello of California is an author, lecturer, chat room host and DNA project participant.

George Pacheco of Rhode Island is a lecturer and researcher associated with the Family History Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Dartmouth, MA.

Workshop fee is $20, payable to the Claire T. Carney Library. Lunch and workshop materials are included. Pre-registration is required.

Please register by calling 508 999-8689 or mail in the attached form with the fee, to the Archives and Special Collections, Claire T. Carney Library, UMass Dartmouth, 285 Old Westport Road, N. Dartmouth, MA, 02747.

For directions to the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, go to https://www.umassd.edu/directions/

Parking will be available in Lot 13.

Presented by the Portuguese-American Archives and the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture and partially funded by

Ferreira-Mendes Portuguese-American Archives Fall ‘09 schedule of events includes lectures, workshops, book talks and exhibits.

Look over the full schedule; You’re sure to find something of interest there!