Category Archives: General Library

Limited Computer Access during New Student Orientation

New Student orientation will take place at the Claire T. Carney Library on the following days:

First-year Session I: June 15 – June 16
Transfer Session: June 20
First-year Session II: June 22 – June 23
First-year Session III: June 26 – 27
First-year Session IV: June 29 – 30

New students will have priority access to library computers as part of their orientation. If you plan to visit the library during Student Orientation, please be aware that Carney Library staff may not have a computer for you to use. That said, the library will remain open to the public and you are welcome to bring your own laptop or mobile device. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

If you have any questions, please contact Library Administration.

Academic Video Online Trial Now Active

The library has activated a trial to the streaming video service “Academic Video Online” through Proquest/Clarivate. This trial will be active until May 31, 2023

Academic Video Online is a comprehensive, multidisciplinary video subscription that supports the entire range of curriculum, from anthropology to zoology. It includes a variety of video material available with curricular relevance: documentaries, interviews, feature films, performances, news programs and newsreels, and demonstrations.

Access the trial through ProQuest Trials.

If you have any questions, contact our Electronic Resources Librarian.

HeinOnline’s LGBTQ+ Rights Content Expanded

New content from the Williams Institute at UCLA has been added to the LGBTQ+ Rights collection available through the HeinOnline database. This database can be accessed through the A-Z database list on the Carney Library website.

“As the newest addition to HeinOnline’s Social Justice Suite, LGBTQ+ Rights is dedicated to charting the gay rights movement in America, showing the civil rights codified into law in the 20th and 21st centuries, as well as the inequalities that still exist today. Titles in this collection are grouped into subcollections focused on specific areas of society, examining issues from same-sex marriage to employment discrimination, military service, and more. 

A unique interactive piece within this collection is the Timeline charting the American gay rights movement from 1950 up to present day. Pulling in documents from HeinOnline, photographs from the Library of Congress, and YouTube videos, this timeline allows users to both visualize the progression of the gay rights movement as well as how HeinOnline documents connect to this overall historical narrative.” –HeinOnline LGBTQ+ Libguide

Welcome back from the Library!

Welcome back for the Spring Semester. We hope you enjoyed the break, and we are excited to have you back on campus!

Here are a few helpful library tips and reminders:

  • Research Help: Our subject librarians are here to help you find articles, books, and other resources for research projects/papers. Don’t be shy! You can email, chat, text, call, or stop by LIB-233 to connect with one of our librarians.
  • Student Study Rooms: You can reserve a group study room for you and your classmates.
  • Get Items from Other Libraries (ILL): If you need articles or books that the Carney Library doesn’t provide access to, request it through interlibrary library loan (ILL). Our ILL department can get you articles, books, and more from libraries across the country and around the world. The best part is there is no extra cost to you.
  • Equipment Loans: The library loans a variety of equipment including overnight laptops, TI-84 Plus calculators, whiteboard markers, and more. Stop by the 1st floor circulation desk to borrow items.
  • Digital Scholarship Hub (DiSH) Events: Register for free workshops on a variety of digital tools such as the upcoming one on RStudio and the Tidyverse, or add one of the “Research Power Hours” to your calendar.
  • Electronic Theses & Dissertations: You can browse and access many recent UMassD theses and dissertations online.
  • Hours: You can always find the library’s hours at https://schedule.lib.umassd.edu/hours/
  • Website: Our recently redesigned website includes information on many more resources.

If you have questions or would like to share feedback, please let us know.

Welcome to the Digital Scholarship Hub (DiSH)!

The Claire T. Carney Library introduces a student-centric space where workshops will be held to demonstrate online tools and scholarly research methods. Digital Scholarship is a broad concept that refers to using digital platforms and methods to answer scholarly inquiries, conduct research, and create scholarly outputs. The DiSH is a multidisciplinary center that engages with data and digital content. This includes managing data, developing a project, digital mapping, and more. Think statistics, temperatures, product comparisons, finances, rankings – essentially, any scholarly scenario where conclusions can be drawn from organizing and manipulating information in a digital format.  The hub offers an opportunity for students to engage with and create knowledge outside of a traditional class setting. It is also an opportunity for multidisciplinary collaboration across campus.

The DiSH is piloting a data workshop series in November called “Fall in Love with Data” where graduate students in the Data Science program will facilitate workshops intended for an interdisciplinary audience. Please RSVP (emma.wood@umassd.edu) to attend a workshop, and join us for snacks and collaboration in a casual setting, room 135 on the first floor of the library. The facilitators of the first workshop in the series, “The Art of Problem Solving,” are enthusiastic about their area of expertise and about sharing their knowledge with others:

“I fell in love with data only when I realized that data is of no use unless you are searching for an answer or trying to solve a problem. Curiosity is my necessity.” – Vijay Mohan Yeddu, Data Science graduate student

“I believe data is the new oil and refining it wisely will supply an abundance of insights which help solve real-world problems!” – Abhiram Raju, Data Science graduate student

Contact Information for DiSH:
Emma Wood, Scholarly Communication Librarian
Email: emma.wood@umassd.edu
Phone: 508-999-8681

Open Access Week Featured Faculty Member: David Kagan, PhD, Physics Department

International Open Access Week (October 24-30, 2022) is a time to recognize free, accessible information online and to inspire scholars to engage in this advantageous model in scholarship and research. The term Open Access refers to scholarly information that is available digitally free of charge and without other access barriers. Some teaching and learning materials, referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER), are published online under flexible licenses called Creative Commons Licenses that allow for sharing and tailoring the information. This includes textbooks – Yes, we said FREE textbooks. Each day this week we will feature a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who uses OER in their classroom or publishes scholarly work under a Creative Commons license. Today’s UMD faculty member is an instructor who has adopted an Openstax textbook, a digital book which is completely free to students.

David Kagan is a professor of physics who has taught at UMass Dartmouth for about 10 years. The foundational concepts of physics don’t change much over time – gravity and magnetism are quite reliable – but student learning styles and modes of teaching continue to evolve. So to keep students engaged, Prof. Kagan opts for dynamic teaching resources, sometimes replacing a standard reading assignment with a video or seeking interactive ways for students to do assessment and learn the material. In class, Prof. Kagan relies heavily on content that he creates himself such as slides and notes. Like many faculty members, teaching during the pandemic accelerated Prof. Kagan’s multimodal approach because one has to get creative when trying to reach students via Zoom. Prof. Kagan uses a trusted resource from Openstax that carries a Creative Commons Attribution License v4.0, and can be shared and adapted. Students need only visit the website and download the book to have access to the required reading. This OER option is comparable in content to the textbooks by Halliday and Resnick that have historically been the cornerstones of introductory physics classes.

Kudos to Prof. Kagan for seeking cost-savings for students and a dynamic classroom experience! For more information about OpenStax textbooks, check out their website https://openstax.org/.

If you are a faculty member who wants to know more about OER, please reach out to our Scholarly Communication Librarian, Emma Wood.

Open Access Week Featured Faculty Publication: Journal of Feminist Scholarship, An Open Access Journal Founded by University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Faculty Members

International Open Access Week (October 24-30, 2022) is a time to recognize Open Access (OA), and to inspire scholars to engage in this beneficial model in scholarship and research. The term Open Access refers to scholarly information that is available digitally, free of charge, and without other access barriers. Some teaching and learning materials, referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER), are published online under flexible licenses called Creative Commons Licenses that allow for sharing and remixing. This includes textbooks – Yes, we said FREE textbooks. Each day this week we will feature a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who uses OER in their classroom or publishes scholarly work under a Creative Commons license. Today we highlight an Open Access Journal that was founded by 3 UMD faculty members, Catherine Villanueva Gardner, Anna M. Klobucka, and Jeannette E. Riley,  in 2011. Anupama Arora, PhD, Professor of English & Communication, and Women’s and Gender Studies, currently serves as co-Executive Editor with Jeannette E. Riley of University of Rhode Island.

Professor Anupama Arora, PhD

The Journal of Feminist Scholarship is an open access, peer-reviewed journal that publishes twice yearly on topics that encourage a discussion of feminist thought for the twenty-first century. In addition to its regular issues, it publishes a unique interview series with important national and international feminist artists, practitioners, or scholars of color who have reshaped their fields, such as the Chicana historian Vicki Ruiz who was awarded a 2014 National Humanities Medal by President Barack Obama; and the Afro-French filmmaker Amandine Gay whose documentary, Ouvrir la Voix (Speak Up; 2016), on Black women in France, is the first of its kind. JFS has also published special issues on relevant contemporary topics such as “Education, Intersectionality, and Social Change,” “Feminist Disability Studies,” and the “Queer Archive.” Since 2011, JFS has emerged as a highly regarded platform with frequent submissions, downloads, and citations in national and international fora. The journal is an excellent resource for researching feminist scholarship across the disciplines. The Journal of Feminist Scholarship 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.

“From its inception, JFS has been committed to a mission to disseminate peer reviewed feminist interdisciplinary scholarship across the social sciences and humanities at no cost to authors or readers. The journal has always maintained a commitment to open-access publication, academic rigor, and political relevance, as well as privileging transnational, intersectional, and interdisciplinary orientations.” – Prof. Anupama Arora

Open Access Week Featured Faculty Member: Marilyn Ardito, Full Time Lecturer, Management & Marketing

International Open Access Week (October 24-30, 2022) is a time to recognize free, accessible information online and to inspire scholars to engage in this advantageous model in scholarship and research. The term Open Access refers to scholarly information that is available digitally free of charge and without other access barriers. Some teaching and learning materials, referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER), are published online under flexible licenses called Creative Commons Licenses that allow for sharing and tailoring the information. This includes textbooks – Yes, we said FREE textbooks. Each day this week we will feature a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who uses OER in their classroom or publishes scholarly work under a Creative Commons license. Today’s UMD faculty member is an educator who uses Open Education Resources in all of her Management and Marketing classes.

Marilyn Ardito is a professor in the Charlton College of Business, and she has been with the university for about three years. Prof. Ardito does not require a traditional textbook for any of the classes she teaches. Rather she opts for free, openly licensed textbooks available through OpenStax which saves her students money and ensures that everyone has the course material on day one. Openstax is a publisher who’s mission is “to improve educational access and learning for everyone.” They accomplish this by producing material for high school and higher education that is accessible online without paywall or special credentials required for access. Prof. Ardito made the move toward adopting Open Education Resources in place of expensive textbooks in her previous teaching position at Providence College. She recognized the ethical dilemma that traditional textbook publishing creates with frequent publication of costly new editions. Further, Prof. Ardito adopted OER textbooks to disengage with textbook bias.

Open Access Week Featured Faculty Member: Elisabeth Buck, PhD, Associate Professor / Director, Writing & Multiliteracy Center, English & Communication

International Open Access Week (October 24-30, 2022) is a time to recognize Open Access (OA), and to inspire scholars to engage in this advantageous model in scholarship and research. The term Open Access refers to scholarly information that is available digitally, free of charge, and without other access barriers. Some teaching and learning materials, referred to as Open Educational Resources (OER), are published online under flexible licenses called Creative Commons Licenses that allow for sharing and remixing. This includes textbooks – Yes, we said FREE textbooks. Each day this week we will feature a UMass Dartmouth faculty member who uses OER in their classroom or publishes scholarly work under a Creative Commons license. Prof. Elisabeth Buck has experience with OER in the classroom as well as Open Access publishing.

Elisabeth Buck is a professor in the English & Communication Department, and she directs the Writing & Multiliteracy Center where UMD students receive free tutoring services. Something that students will not find in any of Prof. Buck’s courses such as ENL 352 Public Relations Writing is an expensive required textbook. Prof. Buck has made the leap to Open Educational Materials (OER), and saves students money on their bookstore bills by assigning free, openly licensed materials in her classes. In addition, she is author of a book called Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) which was nominated for the 2018 International Writing Centers Association Outstanding Book Award. Chapter Five of the text is available open-access. We commend Prof. Buck for her OER efforts in the classroom and in academic publishing.

UMass Dartmouth staff, faculty, and students can access the complete e-book of Open-Access, Multimodality, and Writing Center Studies using this library link. The library also retains a non-circulating print copy of this book and other faculty publications in the Archives & Special Collections – UMass Dartmouth | Claire T. Carney Library.