Happy New Year from Healey Library! As we celebrate the arrival of 2018, we also eagerly anticipate the launch of UMBrella: Covering All Your Research Needs at the end of this month!

In order to help the UMass Boston community take full advantage of UMBrella and all of its features, Healey Library is offering a series of drop-in workshops during the month of February. All faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend these workshops, learn about the wealth of new features available to users, practice using the new tool, get guided assistance from Healey Librarians, and ask any questions they may have.

Sign up for an UMBrella workshop through the UMass Boston Training Portal. Feel free to include this information in your syllabus or course materials as well!

UMBrella workshops are scheduled for:

• Tuesday, February 6: 10-11am
• Wednesday, February 14: 3-4pm
• Thursday, February 22: 12-1pm
• Monday, February 26: 2-3pm

Workshops will be held in the Center for Library Instruction (CLI) on the 4th floor of Healey Library, room 15.

If none of these scheduled times works for you, faculty may also request a one-on-one consultation with a librarian that we can schedule at your convenience. Please contact library.reference@umb.edu or sign up online to arrange an appointment.

Additional instructional materials, including LibGuides and tutorials, will be provided shortly after the Go Live date.

As always, Healey Library welcomes your questions, comments, and concerns about UMBrella, directed to Library.Systems@umb.edu.

Healey Library is making steady progress toward launching UMBrella: Covering All Your Research Needs at the end of January 2018!

UMBrella is so much more than a new search tool. UMBrella will provide users with a one‐stop interface to search the majority of the Library’s wide range of intellectual property: books and e‐books, journal articles, streaming media, archival collections, and high-quality, scholarly Open Access materials. In addition to simplifying your research workflows, UMBrella will be responsive to mobile devices, will allow for natural language searching, and will provide extensive sorting and filtering options to help you quickly refine your results and locate the resources you need.

Additionally, UMBrella will function as a research management system, allowing you to keep track of your searches and the resources you find from a single interface. Signing in using your UMass Boston network ID and password will allow you to:

• View items and resources available at UMass Boston as well as other institutions
• Access your personal virtual bookshelf to save searches and resources, add labels, and view your search history
• Renew books and other library resources
• Export citations to a reference management system like Mendeley or Zotero

We think faculty, staff, and students alike will be pleasantly surprised by how easily and quickly you will be able to search for, discover, and manage Healey Library’s research resources from a single interface.

Healey Library welcomes your questions, comments, and concerns about UMBrella, directed to Library.Systems@umb.edu.

For years, UMass Boston’s faculty, students, and researchers have been yearning for easier ways to search and manage scholarly resources. To fulfill these requests and the University’s goal of providing state-of-the-art Library and IT services, Healey Library has undertaken a transformational library system upgrade. Last year Healey Library, in joint partnership with UMass Boston’s Information Technology Services (ITS) and University Information Technology Services (UITS), began preparing for the migration to a new and full-featured library system infrastructure, which will be launched at the end of January 2018.

Faculty, staff, students, and researchers will access this new system via UMBrella, an easy‐to‐use, one‐stop search and discovery interface for books, e-books, videos, articles, digital media, and so much more. In Summer 2017, Healey Library ran a campus-wide naming contest for this exciting and powerful new system. UMass Boston graduate student Rachel Hoffman was the clear winner with her submission UMBrella: Covering All Your Research Needs, which we think is perfect both for this school and for describing a comprehensive tool for research and knowledge discovery in an increasingly complex information environment.

We are aware that the start of the Spring semester is a busy time for our community. Please be assured that Healey Library, ITS, and UITS staff members have been working hard on this major migration for the past year to make the transition as smooth as possible. We are confident that, with the extensive preparations we have been making, the new system’s more intuitive design, and your patience and support as we resolve inevitable glitches, we can anticipate an exciting and successful launch at the end of January.

In the meantime, please stay tuned for updates and notices about your next steps for experiencing the full benefits of UMBrella.

Healey Library welcomes your questions, comments, and concerns as we take these next exciting steps in streamlining and enriching your research lives. Feedback may be directed to Library.Systems@umb.edu.