Gone are the days of emailing a list of your required course materials to the bookstore staff, traversing COIN to submit course material requests, or both. New this semester, our campus store has implemented a system called Follett Discover which enables faculty to search for material, manage their course adoptions, and make changes as needed all in one virtual location.
Here are some of the key features of this new system:
Follett Discover is integrated with COIN, and it personalizes your dashboard by automatically populating the information about the courses you teach.
There is a “re-adopt” option through which you can efficiently declare the same materials that you have used in past semesters.
Use the search tool to discover publications by title, ISBN, or topic.
The “create content” option allows you to curate a course with a collection of articles or other material.
Add course supplies like kits, lab materials, and barcharts.
Click the “OER” tab to find Open Educational Resources (OER) related to your course. This is a great option for lowering the cost of course materials for your students An example of an OER search for business law is shown below:
The Northeast OER Summit is a gathering of Open Educational Resources (OER) practitioners from the Northeast region of the United States. It offers the opportunity to learn and share effective practices in OER awareness building, implementation, collaboration, strategy, and research.
This year’s virtual summit will take place on April 4th and 5th, and the schedule is available here: 2024 Northeast OER Summit: A World Beyond Affordability. There’s still time to register at the early bird price of $35! Registration is always free for undergraduate students, and scholarships are available for attendees for whom the registration fee is a prohibitive barrier. Please contact any member of the steering committee for scholarship information.
Assistant Professor Peeranuch LeSeure (Nursing) was featured in the International Family Association’s newsletter, highlighting her research on improving self-care management for diabetic patients among the Portuguese population in Massachusetts. LeSeure is developing a mobile app tailored to this population’s cultural needs and values to support self-care management.
Associate Professor Nikolay Anguelov (Public Policy) was featured in a Newsweek article about his research on the number of missing indigenous women in the U.S. and how it relates to the story told in the recently released film Killers of the Flower Moon.
Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Kimberly Scott and Assistant Vice Chancellor for Career & Civic Engagement Matt Roy were interviewed on the Chamber of Commerce’s Education Spotlight. The episode focused on UMass Dartmouth’s commitment to students and community.
Professor Brian Glyn Williams (History) was featured in an article that analyzed the many conflicts currently occurring across the globe and the implications of varying levels of U.S. support.
The Open Educational Resources (OER) Commons offers a variety of useful resources for educators and researchers. If you’re celebrating Women’s History Month in your classroom, or exploring women’s history through research the OER Commons has a “Women’s History Month” collection with over 350 resources available for your needs.
Navigating the collection is easy! You can filter the available resources by subject area, education level, material type, language, and more. There are a variety of videos, downloadable documents, graphics/photos, audio files, and eBooks to choose from.
The National Women’s History Museum is one of the prominently featured authors within the collection offering a variety of biographies of women who have made a significant impact in US history. In addition to these biographies, there are multiple lesson plans available to support classroom learning. Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute offers a unit analyzing case studies on women’s narratives for high school students. For college level students interested in learning more about key feminist concepts and feminist analytical frameworks, this Introduction to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies textbook may be useful!
Visit the Women’s History Month collection on OER Commons to find more valuable resources!
Every year, in the month of March, there is a week-long global recognition of the importance of Open Education. Its goal is to raise awareness about the impact of open education on teaching and learning worldwide. Open Education Global promotes events on an international scale to increase knowledge of Open Educational Resources (OER) and other topics within Open Education. Hopefully you will have a chance to participate in some of these opportunities, and you may consider the following events offered by Massachusetts state colleges and universities, including a panel to be held here at UMass Dartmouth.
As generative tools like Chat GPT and Gemini become more popular, libraries are facing new questions about electronic resources licensing and use. Subscription resources provided by libraries open up a world of content and it might not always be clear how that content can or should be used. For example, can articles from library databases be scraped in order to train Large Language Models (LLM’s)? Is it ok to load an article into a chat bot in order to request a summary? Does this violate the agreement many schools have against sharing content with third parties? When it comes to LLM’s, what constitutes ethical use of content that was created by someone else?
Recently, the New York Times brought a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft claiming the companies used millions of articles from the publication to train chatbots in a breech of copyright. These chatbots then became competitors with the Times for those seeking online information.
Librarians will likely see clauses about the use of electronic publications related to large language models popping up in license agreements as content creators and copyright holders seek to protect their work. And as some sectors push for the rapid advancement of this technology, stressing the benefits it may bring, we will still need to grapple with ethical and other considerations related to potential harms. As educators, this includes bringing these issues into conversation spaces with students and colleagues and hopefully charting the way forward together.
James grills, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Are you trying to do research on a particular country? You may be interested in their political or economic climate. You may be interested in their history. Or you may be interested in working or building a business there. Government data and statistics are often published in publicly accessible platforms and private companies help to analyze and organize that information. The library has access to up-to-date country reports and can direct you to numerous government sources and others to fill in the picture.
Ebsco’s Business Source Complete (BSC) database is the first stop. Enter the name of your country of interest, select “country report” under Publication Type and then hit Search. You will find monthly risk updates from S&P’s Country Monitor, lengthy analyses from Marketline, single page summaries and more. ProQuest’s ABI/Inform Trade & Industry database also has country reports with 10-year forecasts. Search for Fisk Report (name of country) and you will get reports for the country and reports for that country’s industrial sectors.
If your research is business related, Marketline does industry reports by country that are also found in BSC. You will find reports such as Marketline Industry Profile: Haircare in China or Marketline Industry Profile: Savory Snacks in India. The database IbisWorld also profiles industries for some of our largest trading partners, such as Oil & Gas Extraction in Mexico or Commercial Banks in China.
There are numerous .gov resources available. The first stop should be the State Department (https://www.state.gov/) where you will be given travel risk information and a description of US relations with the country of interest. From here you can link to many other .gov resources including the Commerce Department’s guides. The next stop is the Office of the US Trade Representative (https://ustr.gov/). Then on to the CIA (https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/). You can also go directly to the Country Commercial Guides without going through the State Department site (https://www.trade.gov/country-commercial-guides).
If you are researching an Emerging Markets nation, get a Boston Public Library eCard and use their database EMIS. “EMIS operates in and reports on countries where high reward goes hand-in-hand with high risk. We bring you time-sensitive, hard-to-get, relevant news, research and analytical data, peer comparisons and more for over 197+ emerging markets.”
And finally, don’t forget to check on the country’s own government agencies and websites. Most have at least some access in English and if you can read the local language can offer great depth of information. Google Ministry of (Finance? Economy? Health? Labor?) (country name) and you will usually find the .gov you are seeking. For example, googling Ministry of Economy Argentina gets you this result: https://www.economia.gob.ar/en/ which has some information in English and offers English speakers help with material only available in Spanish.
Here is the latest news in UMD faculty, staff, and community publishing and research:
Professor Brian Williams (History) was featured in an article that discusses the response to a drone attack in Jordan that resulted in the death of three American soldiers. Williams stressed the complexity of responding to such attacks, considering the delicate geopolitical situation in the region.
Professor Kenneth Manning (Political Science) was featured in an article that discusses the political landscape leading up to the November 2024 election, focusing on the potential candidacy of former President Donald Trump and the challenges he may face.
Professor Chad McGuire (Public Policy) published Considering Ecosystem Integrity and Resiliency in U.S. Federal Policy. The article overviews how recently proposed and implemented changes to major U.S. federal policies are attempting to incorporate better the effects of climate change and sea-level rise on coastal ecosystem integrity.
Professor Doug Roscoe (Political Science) was featured in an ABC News article about the current issues within the Michigan, Arizona, and Georgia state republican parties. This dysfunction within these crucial general election swing states could have significant ramifications during November’s election.
Associate Professor Nikolay Anguelov (Public Policy) was interviewed on KCBS radio about fast fashion related to the Super Bowl—particularly, the impacts of pre-printed merchandise for each team in case of victory
Open Education Week is March 4th – 8th, and one excellent way to celebrate is by attending this virtual panel. This is an opportunity for faculty to learn about OER Commons, a repository for Open Educational Materials (OER) and 3 exciting textbook projects at UMass Dartmouth. Open Educational Materials are teaching and learning tools such as textbooks, tests/quizzes, and classroom activities that are available free of charge. At UMass Dartmouth we have an OER Creators program through which 3 open textbooks were created in 2023. 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. This panel will also include a demo of OER Commons by Repository Coordinator Rachel Oleaga. We welcome faculty who are curious about OER, open publishing, digital texbooks, open repositories, or who are just interested in the topics covered by these free textbooks. Register here: https://schedule.lib.umassd.edu/event/12057953?hs=a
The University has required graduate students to deposit two physical copies of their Master’s thesis in the library since 1990. The library then had them bound as hardcover copies. One copy went to the Archives and Special Collections as the record copy that did not circulate, and the other went to the shelves of the library for circulation. The College of Visual and Performing Arts (CVPA) and the College of Engineering began depositing them in the library years before the requirement. Currently there are over 2,000 hard copy theses and dissertations in the Archives and Special Collections, 1970-2017. These can be viewed at anytime during Archives and Special Collections open hours. In 2017 the University shifted to accepting theses and dissertations in digital form only. The library makes them available, full text, in the Digital Archives. The record copies are preserved by the Archives. To browse the collection, see the landing page at https://umassd.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/collectionDiscovery?vid=01MA_DM_INST:umassd_library&collectionId=8187867480001301
