On Wednesday, March 12th, the Claire T. Carney Library will host area high school students competing in the Junior Achievement Titan Business Challenge. The challenge is “a day-long business strategy competition in which students compete against other high schools in teams of three using an online business simulation.” The teams are supported by volunteer business mentors who help guide and teach the students.
The library’s 1st floor and 2nd floor computers will be unavailable starting the afternoon of March 11 – March 12. If you plan to visit the library during this time, you are welcome to bring your own laptop or mobile device. UMass Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff may also borrow laptops at the first floor circulation desk.
March 3 – 7 is Open Education Week, an annual celebration designed to raise awareness and acknowledge successes in open education worldwide. Open Education is a movement that seeks to make learning more accessible and free from financial barriers. Examples of Open Education practices include adopting free, openly licensed textbooks from Openstax or OER Commons. Here are a few ways you can explore Open Education and get involved in OER this week and beyond:
Libretexts is offering a full schedule of events this week, from a four-part series designed to get faculty started in the ADAPT open homework and assessment platform, to presentations on creating, remixing, editing, adapting, an adopting OER with LibreTexts.
Accessibility in OER Commons, Thursday, March 6th, 10:00am with Rachel Oleaga, Open Massachusetts Hub Coordinator – “Open Massachusetts” is a platform for sharing open educational resources created and adopted by faculty from Massachusetts Public Higher Education Institutions. Attend this webinar to learn about accessibility features of the platform.
Open Educational Resources: Pro Search Tips, Friday, March 7th, 10:00am – 10:45am with Rebecca Dowgiert of Framingham State University – “There’s no OER out there for my program/course.” You may be right… but you also just might be surprised at what’s out there these days. Literally – new OERs are coming out every month. Come learn OER pro searching tips (including the easiest tip of all).
New Student orientation will take place at the Claire T. Carney Library over a few days in January. Please note that this will limit access to our public computers on the following days:
Wednesday, January 15 – Transfer Orientation
Thursday, January 16 – New Student and Family Orientation
Friday, January 17 – Back up day in case of snow
New students will have priority access to the library’s 1st floor and 2nd floor computers as part of their training on UMass Dartmouth systems. If you plan to visit the library during orientation, you are welcome to bring your own laptop or mobile device. UMass Dartmouth students, faculty, and staff may also borrow laptops at the first floor circulation desk.
Feeling that end-of-semester stress? Chris Peter and Gracie will be in the Library’s Living Room on Monday, December 9 from 10-11AM, so if you would like to spend time with a lovely therapy dog, please stop by!
10 years ago Hilary Kraus, Kari Mofford, and Alexis Teagarden started the Dystopian Book Club. Hilary and Kari went on to a new theme in 2016, the Science Fiction Book Club, and Olivia Piepmeier joined us to help organize and publicize the meetings. During COVID, we tried to make things a bit more flexible with readers choosing their own titles with a common theme. Now the group chooses the theme periodically, and we all vote to rank title suggestions and work through the list until we decide we need a new theme.
We will be choosing a new theme for Spring 2025 and we love to welcome new members, so please contact Kari Mofford if you would like to join us!
Here is the entire list of titles (and themes) throughout the years. We have read A LOT of books… which ones were your favorites? Let us know by leaving a comment below!
Dystopian: 2014-2015
2014
Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
2015
Spring
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
The Giver by Lois Lowry
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Summer – Women Sleuths Theme
Nancy Drew (Original Series) – Reader’s pick
Cocaine Blues by Kerry Greenwood
Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers
Fall Titles
Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
Science Fiction: 2016-2019
2016
Spring
Watchmen by author Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons
The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
Magical Summer Theme
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J.K. Rowling
Peter & the Starcatchers by Dave Barry & Ridley Pearson
So You Want to be a Wizard? by Diane Duane
Fall
More Than Human by Theodore Sturgeon
The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula K. LeGuin
2017
Spring
Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler
The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
Summer: Fantasy on Film
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle
American Gods by Neil Gaiman
The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
Fall
Lumberjanes Volume 1: Beware the Kitten Holy by ND Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Shannon Watters, and Gus A. Allen
A Night in the Lonesome October by Roger Zelazny
The Martian by Andy Weir
2018
Spring
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick
Lovecraft Country by Matt Ruff
Sleeping Giants by Sylvain Neuvel
Summer: A Cinderella Summer
Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Ash by Malinda Lo, and the Original Grimm’s Fairy Tale
Fall
Timeline by Michael Crichton
Blackout by Connie Willis
Trillium by Jeff Lemire
2019
Spring
Leviathan by Scott Westerfeld
His Majesty’s Dragon by Naomi Novik
Dread Nation by Justina Ireland
Summer: A Summer of Comics
Here by Richard McGuire
Woman World by Aminder Dhaliwal
On a Sunbeam by Tillie Walden
Fall: Space Exploration/Adventure
Binti by Nnedi Okorafor
Red Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson
Climate and Travel: 2020-2021
Spring 2020: Climate Change
Blackfish City by Sam J. Miller
The End We Start From by Megan Hunter (Cancelled)
A Friend of the Earth by T. Coraghessan Boyle (Virtual)
Summer 2020: Choose your own title
Fall 2020 – Spring 2021: Travel: Choose a book with geographical theme
October = Antarctica
November = South America
December = Asia
January = North America
February = Africa
March = Australia
April = Europe
Adventures, Quests, and Treasure Hunts: 2021
Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton
The Secret Treasure of Oak Island: The Amazing True Story of a Centuries-Old Treasure Hunt by D’Arcy O’Connor
International Open Access Week (October 21-27, 2024) is a time to recognize Open Access (OA), and to inspire scholars to engage in this publishing model in scholarship and research. OA means information that is available digitally without cost or access barriers. Today on the blog, we highlight two OA journals with UMass Dartmouth roots:
The Journal of Feminist Scholarship (JFS) is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes twice a year on topics that encourage a discussion of feminist thought for the twenty-first century. In addition to its regular issues, it publishes an interview series with important national and international feminist artists, practitioners, and scholars of color who have reshaped their fields. JFS has become highly regarded with frequent submissions, downloads, and citations in national and international fora. The journal is a great resource for researching feminist scholarship across the disciplines, and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which means that researchers are free to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of the articles.
Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies
Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies (PLCS) is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed hybrid (online and print) journal that publishes original research about the literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world from a broad range of academic, critical and theoretical approaches. Mario Pereira and Anna M. Klobucka currently serve as co-editors. PLCS is published semi-annually by Tagus Press in the Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Tagus Press is the publishing division of the UMassD Center for Portuguese Studies and Culture, an outreach unit committed to the study of the language, literatures and cultures of the Portuguese-speaking world. With the help of the Claire T. Carney Library, the journal is available publicly through Open Journal Systems (OJS), which aims to facilitate open access, peer-reviewed publishing.
International Open Access Week (October 21-27, 2024) is a time to recognize free and accessible research and scholarship and to inspire scholars to engage in the advantageous OA model in publishing. The term Open Access refers to scholarly material that is available digitally free of charge and without other access barriers. Today we will highlight a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who has published along with a UMass Dartmouth student under a Creative Commons license in an Open Access journal.
Nicholas Zambrotta is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Psychology department whose research interests include morality, political polarization, and social support and health related behaviors. In early 2024 Zambrotta published an article called “Attitude Changes Among College Students Post-Pandemic” with Alex Goncalo who was working on his BS in Finance. Goncalo has since earned his MS, and has gone on to pursue his PhD in Finance at the University of South Florida. Their study “measured happiness, optimism, and psychological well-being in a sample of 182 college students via an electronic Qualtrics questionnaire to identify predictors of state optimism and examine potential differences in these variables between class rankings.” The results of their survey and analysis can be read and shared (with attribution) by any researcher thanks to the OA model of their selected publication, Modern Psychological Studies.
The journalis managed by undergraduate students at the University of Tennessee Chattanooga, and not only is it student-led, but Modern Psychological Studies focuses on publishing quality articles by undergraduate students. Regarding the review process, Goncalo says, “Their rigorous review process was enlightening, which contributed greatly to this undeniably invaluable experience.” Authors who choose to publish with MPS actually retain their copyright under a Non-Exclusive Distribution License. This arrangement protects freedoms of the authors, while the Creative Commons licenses applied to each article ensure that all researchers can benefit from the work.
Open Access (OA) is a publishing model that values access over commercialization and makes scholarly material like research articles and books available to the public at no cost. International Open Access Week (October 21 – 27, 2024) is a time to recognize the importance of OA and to raise awareness. When information is readily available to all researchers, it can be more widely read, cited, and expanded. Are you interested in learning more about Open Access and breaking down paywalls? Consider attending these OA Week webinars hosted in Massachusetts:
This workshop is tailored for faculty members who are new to Open Educational Resources (OER) and are curious about how these free and openly licensed materials can enhance their teaching.
This 30-minute webinar will explain why ‘Open’ is crucial to the definition of ‘Open Educational Resources’ (OER), permitting OER’s use for truly innovative pedagogy.
Welcome and welcome back! The Library Book Club welcomes new members, and we have some great titles this semester as we continue to explore the Fantasy genre.
Wednesday, October 16, Noon – 1pm: The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin
Tuesday, December 3, 11:30am – 12:30pm: Fairy Tale by Stephen King
We will meet in Library 240. If you would like to join by Zoom, have any questions, or would like to be added to our email list, please contact Kari Mofford.
We were saddened to learn about the passing of Claire T. Carney. She was a kind and generous woman whose commitment to life long learning is memorialized in the name of the UMass Dartmouth library.
All library staff who had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Carney have had wonderful things to say about her. We are honored to work in a building named after such a remarkable woman.
