Falcon Season 2018 is here!

Falcon Cam is live on our website and our YouTube channel.

When we installed the camera for the 2018 season on April 23, we found one egg in the nest. Because of the cold temperatures and wet weather in April, it appears the single early egg is inviable. With the past as our guide, we are hopeful the mating pair will lay additional eggs this season. Thank you for watching.

The UMass Amherst Libraries Digital Media Lab is pleased to announce the winners of the Ready Player One Virtual Reality Competition. To commemorate the lab’s new virtual reality (VR) capabilities from HTC VIVE, the official partner of the new film, Ready Player One, UMass Amherst students were challenged to produce a short video describing their vision of how VR technology and its applications could enhance student life on campus.

First Place: Parker Louison ’20, for an idea based on a VR application to develop simulations of various career paths and areas of study. This will help students “test the waters” of their various interests, stretching their perspectives on their own capabilities and helping them thrive in and be passionate about their future careers. Louison received an HTC VIVE set valued at $599 donated to the UMass Amherst Libraries by Dr. Steve Acquah, Digital Media Lab Unit Coordinator and Associate Adjunct Professor of Chemistry.

Second Place: Benjamin Abraham ’21, for an idea to incorporate VR into UMass Medical Services to help military veterans cope with traumatic experiences. VR therapy using applications such as Bravemind may help in the healing process of our nation’s combat personnel. Abraham received a copy of the book Ready Player One, signed by author Ernest Cline, and a $20 Cinemark Gift Card.

Third Place: Harrison Packer ’19, for an idea to enhance the sustainability aspect of campus life with a virtual reality app supporting clean energy initiatives, allowing students to examine how green technology can affect the environment. Packer received a $20 Cinemark Gift Card.

Acquah, who also serves as Director of the Global Educational Outreach for Science Engineering and Technology (GEOSET) initiative founded with one of the 1996 Nobel Laureates in Chemistry, is very pleased with the outcome of the competition.

“The students at UMass Amherst show a passion for their campus community with creative and innovative ideas that can enhance campus life,” he stated. “I’m looking forward to working with our talented students on their ideas for VR applications. Our team, including the leader of our VR facility, Yuntian Hu, is ready to help enhance the student experience through technology.”

Currently located on Floor 3 of the W. E. B. Du Bois Library, the UMass Amherst Digital Media Lab is a multimedia and 3D print production space designed to support students working on video, audio, animation, and 3D modeling.

The UMass Amherst Libraries have been chosen by the University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) and the University of Nevada-Reno as one of four additional university partners to participate in a pilot study entitled Maker Competencies and the Undergraduate Curriculum.

Funded by a $49,800 National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), the study seeks to explore the impacts of academic library makerspaces–spaces with technological resources and equipment for project-based collaboration–on undergraduate student learning.

Sarah Hutton, Head of Undergraduate Teaching and Learning Services at the UMass Amherst Libraries and President of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) New England Chapter, applied for the partnership on behalf of the Digital Media Lab, a cross-disciplinary makerspace in the W. E. B. Du Bois Library where all students have access to professional-quality audiovisual production facilities and equipment, as well as the Makerbot Innovation Center for 3D printing.

As a partner in the study, the UMass Amherst Libraries will work towards four main goals: to pilot a diverse selection of undergraduate courses in academic library makerspaces; to expand and improve the early stage list of maker-based competencies originally developed by UTA Libraries’ Maker Literacies Task Force; to create and explore various assessment methods and tools for measuring student learning in makerspaces; and to develop an online repository of Open Educational Resources (OER) for utilizing and assessing maker-based competencies.

To accomplish these goals, Hutton will be collaborating with UMass Amherst Professors Alex Schreyer in the Building and Construction Technology program and Charlie Schweik of Environmental Conservation and the School of Public Policy over the Spring 2018 semester in their Makerspace-related class offerings: Schreyer’s “Designing with 3D CAD & BIM” and “Studies in Building Information Modeling” and Schweik’s “Makerspace Leadership and Outreach.”

According to Hutton, “Our hope is to develop competencies that could hopefully be as widely recognized and utilized as the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy–essentially, a common language for curriculum mapping and development throughout makerspaces in libraries all over the country and the world.”

The UMass Amherst Libraries are pleased to announce that Annie Sollinger, Digital Image Metadata Librarian, has been selected as a winner of this year’s Digital Library Federation (DLF) & Kress Cross-Pollinator Awards.

A member of the Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center (formerly the Image Collection Library), Sollinger works closely with the Department of the History of Art and Architecture in particular to provide quality digital images, metadata, and research support. She states, “As we add to our traditional visual resources work, I am excited about building new services that are accessible and equitable from the ground up.”

The Kress Cross-Pollinator Awards bring in awardees from non-DLF members who belong to other cultural organizations. These awards provide a travel fellowship to the annual DLF Forum, serving as a meeting place, marketplace, and congress for digital library practitioners from member institutions and the broader community. This year, the Forum will be held in Pittsburgh on October 23-25.