Eastern Massachusetts Older Women’s League (OWL) records now available for research

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Older Women’s League (OWL) records

Eastern Massachusetts Older Women’s League (OWL) records

University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston is pleased to announce that the records of the Eastern Massachusetts Older Women’s League (OWL), 1988-2015, have been processed and are available for research.

This collection documents the activities of the Eastern Massachusetts Older Women’s League. Materials consist of files kept by staff and include by-laws, conference planning, correspondence, notes, publications, and ephemera.

Founded in 1980, the Eastern Massachusetts Older Women’s League (OWL) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts research, education, and advocacy activities to improve the status and quality of life of midlife and older women. Many of these improvements were aimed towards women’s access to high-quality, affordable health care, ensuring that all women have the tools necessary to build personal economic security, while advocating for the right of all people to maintain control of decisions affecting their well-being through the end of life.

The finding aid for this collection is available here.

For questions about this collection or to schedule a research appointment, please contact library.archives@umb.edu or 617-287-5469.

University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities.

University Archives & Special Collections welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to University Archives & Special Collections, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.

Boston Urban Gardeners records: Documenting community gardening and urban agriculture

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BUG SC-043-B009-F577-001Post by Corinne Bermon, Archives Assistant

University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at the University of Massachusetts Boston is pleased to announce that the records of Boston Urban Gardeners (or BUG) have been reprocessed and newer accessions have been added to the collection. This collection documents a range of activities, projects, and publications from 1891 to 2004, with the bulk of the records spanning 1976 (when BUG was founded) to 1989. The finding aid for this collection has been updated and is available here.

The City of Boston has a number of well-established community gardens, with over 50 acres that have helped urban dwellers feed themselves and their neighborhoods since the early nineteenth century. These dedicated urban green areas furnish residents with fresh produce, plants, and flowers. The original community gardens founded around the city provided food supplements for low-income families and senior citizens and offered space for community organizing and gatherings.

Boston Urban Gardeners, founded in 1976, began as a project in the modern urban agriculture movement, especially in making the connections between urban food access, land use, affordable housing, desegregation, and other issues. Founders Charlotte Kahn and Wagner and Ed Cooper understood that “because urban gardening is so empowering, it is inherently political.” BUG was launched by people who lived in inner-city neighborhoods and most board members were residents and gardeners themselves.

Community Garden, 1978 (West Springfield Community Garden in Boston’s South End). Photograph from BUG collection.
Community Garden, 2016 (West Springfield Community Garden in Boston’s South End). Image from Google Maps.

Almost immediately, BUG’s activities began to broaden beyond gardening to the larger social, economic, and political issues that reflected the concerns of its founders, staff, and board members in their surrounding neighborhoods. The list of projects sponsored by BUG is impressive in its scope: community gardens, play-lots, wildflower meadows, a job training program in landscape contracting and management, studies for the landscape of public housing, low maintenance landscapes for highway rights-of-way, and an open space study for Roxbury.

Cover from BUG SC-043-B009-F566-001

Lead in the Soil pamphlet. Click to view a PDF.

Among the projects BUG instituted were Lead in the Soil and Project HUMUS (Help Us Make Urban Soil). Both of these initiatives focused on helping communities learn about their immediate environments. Lead in the Soil educated citizens on the risks of heavy metals in both indoor and outdoor environments through pamphlets, articles, and newsletters. The collection in University Archives & Special Collections at UMass Boston offers a first-person view into this project, with BUG’s staff files documenting their work on the task force. In tandem with the Lead in the Soil project, Project HUMUS (see image above) worked with the Division of Land Use of the Massachusetts Department of Food and Agriculture to attempt to create a large-scale urban composting site to provide rich soil to urban gardens and a clean waste disposal facility. This series in the collection contains BUG’s compost project staff’s files which document the project from 1978 to 1982.

In 1990, BUG conveyed its funds and properties to the Boston Natural Areas Network (BNAN), which is now an Affiliate of The Trustees of Reservations.

The BUG records consist of files kept by project and regular staff and include annual reports and other reports, proposals, correspondence, by-laws, minutes, articles, newsletters, photographs, and leaflets/pamphlets, material published by BUG, flyers, clippings, contracts, maps, plans and drawings.

View a map of Boston’s Community Gardens here.

View the finding aid for the Boston Urban Gardeners Records here.

For questions about this collection or to schedule a research appointment, please contact library.archives@umb.edu or 617-287-5469.

University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities.

University Archives & Special Collections welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to University Archives & Special Collections, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.

Remembering historian and public history professor James Green

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UMass Boston Labor Resource Center staff in 2001. Left to right: Administrative Coordinator Jean Pishkin, CPCS Professor and LRC board member Terry McClarney, Labor Extension Coordinator Tess Ewing, Director Pat Reeve, Program Director James Green, Researcher Deb Osnowitz, and Researcher Mary Jo Connelly.

James Green with UMass Boston Labor Resource Center staff in 2001. Left to right: Administrative Coordinator Jean Pishkin, CPCS Professor and LRC board member Terry McClarney, Labor Extension Coordinator Tess Ewing, Director Pat Reeve, Program Director James Green, Researcher Deb Osnowitz, and Researcher Mary Jo Connelly.

We’re sad to hear of the passing of James Green, labor historian and professor emeritus of history at the University of Massachusetts Boston. Professor Green was a long-time supporter of University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston, as well as a regular collaborator. Read the Boston Globe’s obituary for James Green here.

In 2011, Professor Green donated his papers to University Archives & Special Collections. This collection details the scholarly career and activist history of Professor Green, dating from 1964 to 2010. Scholarly materials consist of research materials related to his published books, as well as essays, published articles, book reviews, public addresses, political speeches, papers presented at conferences, and correspondence with scholars and colleagues. There is also a significant portion of the collection devoted to his administrative duties as director of the Labor Resource Center and his duties within the College of Public and Community Service. In the spring of 2008, Professor Green joined the History Department at UMass Boston, where he created and directed the graduate program in Public History.

View the finding aid for the James Green papers here.

There are several photographs of Professor Green on our digital collections site, as well as a short interview Professor Green contributed as part of our UMass Boston Mass. Memories Road Show in 2014, in which he describes his work at UMass Boston and as part of union activities on campus.

James Green at the UMass Boston Mass. Memories Road Show: Video Interview from UMass Boston Archives on Vimeo.

UASC-0140-0062-00012-0001-VID

MOOC Design and Delivery: Latest issue of Current Issues in Emerging eLearning available on ScholarWorks

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cover imageThe second in a two-part series, the new issue of Current Issues in Emerging eLearning explores the evolving landscape of “MOOC theory and practice” that has emerged in the four years since the New York Times dubbed 2012 the “year of the MOOC.”

Current Issues in Emerging eLearning launched in 2014 and is an open access, peer-reviewed, online journal of applied research and critical thought on eLearning practice and emerging pedagogical methods. The journal is published by the Center for Innovation and Excellence in eLearning, and sponsored by the College of Advancing and Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Apart from a foreword by editor-in-chief Alan Girelli and by Leslie Limon, the contents of this special issue include:

To view the full issue, and to explore back issues of this publication, click here.

ScholarWorks is the University of Massachusetts Boston’s online institutional repository for scholarship and research. ScholarWorks serves as a publishing platform, a preservation service, and a showcase for the research and scholarly output of members of the UMass Boston community. ScholarWorks is a service of the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston.

Salted, Pickled, and Smoked: Preserving the Cultural Heritage of New Bedford’s Fishing Community

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nbfhc_Salted24x36When: Saturday, May 21, 2016 | 11:00 am – 3:30 pm

Location: New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park Visitor Center | 33 William Street | New Bedford, Mass. | Click here for directions.

Do you have a connection to New Bedford’s fishing heritage? Share your memories at this free, public Fishing Heritage Digitizing Day organized by the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center.

The event is part of a year-long effort to digitize the cultural heritage of New Bedford’s fishing community. The project is a collaboration involving the New Bedford Fishing Heritage Center, New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park, the New Bedford Public Library, MIT Sea Grant, the Claire T. Carney Library at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, and the Joseph P. Healey Library at University of Massachusetts Boston. Funding for this project is provided through a Common Heritage grant program from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Staff from University Archives & Special Collections at UMass Boston and volunteers from the department’s Mass. Memories Road Show program will be on hand to register contributors, scan images, and record stories. The photographs and stories collected at this event will be added to the department’s online collection at openarchives.umb.edu.

Read more about this event here. Download the flyer for “Salted, Pickled, and Smoked” and remember to share it with your friends.  

University Archives & Special Collections in the Joseph P. Healey Library at UMass Boston collects materials related to the university’s history, as well as materials that reflect the institution’s urban mission and strong support of community service, notably in collections of records of urban planning, social welfare, social action, alternative movements, community organizations, and local history related to neighboring communities.

University Archives & Special Collections welcomes inquiries from individuals, organizations, and businesses interested in donating materials of an archival nature that that fit within our collecting policy. These include manuscripts, documents, organizational archives, collections of photographs, unique publications, and audio and video media. For more information about donating to University Archives & Special Collections, click here or email library.archives@umb.edu.