Announcements, UMBrella Update, What's Cool

UMBrella Update: What Does It Do?

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UMBrella Update

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.

Announcements, UMBrella Update, What's Cool

UMBrella Update: Arriving January 2018!

UMBrella Update

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.

Student Rachel Hoffman with umbrella
UMass Boston graduate student Rachel Hoffman, winner of the search tool naming contest

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.

Announcements, Resources, Trial period for a resource

Try Out a Government, Politics, and Law Database!

HeinOnline LogoHealey Library invites your feedback on a new trial database, billed as “the world’s largest image-based government document and legal research database,” HeinOnline’s Government, Politics and Law package. This resource is on trial through March 31, 2018.

This database provides extensive coverage of legal history and government documents, including U.S. statutes and case law available as PDF downloads, and more than 300 years of information covering political development. It might be of particular interest to users looking for a replacement for WestLaw.

Five Things You Can Do In Less Than 15 Seconds in HeinOnline

Five Things You Can Do in Less Than 15 Seconds in HeinOnline

This database’s more than 50 million pages of content cover subjects applicable to:

  • Political Science
  • Criminal Justice
  • World History
  • Civil & Human Rights
  • And more than 80 other subject areas

HeinOnline offers several training resources to help new users search and navigate within the interface, quickly retrieve documents, and use helpful tools and resources integrated throughout the database:

To learn more, watch this three minute video.

Login now at http://ezproxy.lib.umb.edu/login?url=http://heinonline.org/HOL/Welcome, or via the Healey Library Databases & Indexes page.

Let us know what you think of this resource with this feedback form!

Danitta Wong
Danitta Wong

Please direct any questions or comments to Danitta Wong, Head of Collection Development and Assessment:
Danitta.Wong@umb.edu or 617.287.5924

 

 

The Dean's Desk

The academic new year is in gear!

Warm autumnal greetings from Healey Library! With the academic year in full swing, we wanted to provide some quick updates from the academic heart of our ever-changing campus and direct you to some resources in support of your research, teaching, and studying.

Former Dean Daniel Ortiz
Daniel Ortiz, former Dean of Univeristy Libraries

First of all,  as many of you know, Daniel Ortiz, former Dean of University Libraries, retired in July after nearly 25 years of visionary leadership and service to Healey Library and UMass Boston.  We miss him!  I have assumed the role of Interim Dean of University Libraries, and Andrew Elder is serving as the Interim University Archivist and Curator of Special Collections; both of us would love to hear from you about your goals for this academic year and ways that the Library and the Archives might help you achieve them.

One of the initiatives that Dean Ortiz spearheaded before his departure was the start of a project to transform the information-discovery  landscape for the campus.  To that end, Healey Library is partnering with IT Services on a massive system upgrade which will result in the arrival in January 2018 of a long-awaited single-search box for library resources, to be known as (drumroll, please):

UMBrella:
the single search box covering all your research needs!

umbrellas in rainbow colorsThis delightful name and tagline were submitted by UMass Boston student Rachel Hoffman, hands-down winner of  the naming contest we held this summer.  Congratulations, and thank you, Rachel!  (Honorable mention is hereby awarded to every person who suggested Searchy McSearchface, a close runner-up.) Stay tuned for much more information to come about the efficient,  user-friendly and personalized discovery experience that UMBrella will offer you come spring semester.  (Photo credit: by Alejandro Garrido Navarro  on Unsplash) 

Throughout this academic year, I hope that you will take advantage of all that Healey Library offers the UMass Boston community.  Our handy  Library Services Brochure includes a plethora of  useful information about Interlibrary Loan, Ask-a-Librarian,  Course Reserves, Collections, Research Guides, and so much more.  For faculty, our Start-of-School Library Checklist runs through the essential steps for you to make good use of the Library and its offerings.  We also offer a Library Syllabus Attachment that can give students a jump-start on searching library resources.  Finally, the UMass Boston community is invited to review the University Libraries 2017 Annual Report, which includes Dean Daniel Ortiz’s final reflections on the Library’s many evolutions and his vision for its future.

As always, all of us at Healey Library look forward to partnering with you in your teaching, learning, scholarship, and service. Please don’t hesitate to contact me if there is anything you need as you leap into the academic year.

J. Riley Profile Pic

Joanne Riley
Interim Dean of University Libraries

Announcements, Resources

Citation Management Platforms

As of May 26, 2017, Healey Library will no longer be providing access to RefWorks. For over a decade, RefWorks has been licensed by Healey Library as our primary citation management platform, but the time has come to replace it with more sophisticated, cost-free citation management tools such as Zotero and Mendeley.

Please do not worry if you are currently using RefWorks for an assignment or research project that will be completed before the end of the academic year. We will continue to support and provide access to RefWorks for the remainder of the academic year, so students, faculty, staff, and alumni are certainly welcome to continue to use it up until we discontinue our subscription on May 26, 2017. If you no longer use RefWorks, your account will be deleted, and no further action is needed.

The Library encourages you, however, to consider your options for adopting a new citation management platform. The Library is offering assistance during this transition as follows:

  • Librarians already have workshops available in selecting a citation manager as well as training in both Zotero and Mendeley. These workshops are available to all faculty, staff, and students and will be offered throughout the Spring semester as well.
  • Librarians have prepared online documentation to assist all community members in the transition from RefWorks.  You will find in this link clear instructions on how to export your reference library from RefWorks into another citation manager.  You will also find a comparison of different citation management programs to help you choose a new citation management platform to use.

Please contact Mary Moser, Deputy Manager for Outreach, Marketing, Fundraising, and Grants at mary.moser@umb.edu or 617.287.3207 with any questions, concerns, or feedback. Thank you for your patience and your continued support of Healey Library!

 

Updates from UMass Boston's Healey Library