News
Election Day is November 5, and the UMass Amherst Libraries have you covered. Here are a few of our resources to help prepare for Tuesday:
Voting Resources Available Freely Online
Polling Locations for Massachusetts can be found here.
Ballotpedia provides information about the upcoming election, including a preview of what your ballot looks like.
The Election Protection Coalition is the largest and oldest nonpartisan election protection organization that helps to ensure all voters have the opportunity to vote.
If you have problems while voting, call:
English: 866-OUR-VOTE
Spanish: 888-VE-Y-VOTA
Arabic: 844-YALLA-US
Asian and Pacific Languages: 888-API-VOTE
American Sign Language: 301-818-VOTE
You can also find the Coalition on Twitter and Facebook.
The Federal Election Commission provides election news and information.
The National Archives & Records Administration (NARA) has a page of voting information where you can check your registration.
The US Congress website has a list of the bills being considered this session, among other information.
The US Election Assistance Commission has resources for voters, including information in multiple languages.
UMass Amherst Libraries Resources
Congress Collection is a collection of facts about the activities of Congress, such as biographical data and voting habits of current members, and how members are rated by interest groups.
Questions? Contact Lisa DiValentino, Law and Public Policy Librarian, at ldivalentino@umass.edu or Laura Quilter, Copyright and Information Policy Librarian, at lquilter@library.umass.edu.
The UMass Amherst Libraries are committed to supporting our colleagues at other institutions and to working with them to transform the way libraries license and provide access to scholarly content. The Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communications is a leading advocate for changes in the scholarly communications process, spearheading the adoption by UMass Faculty Senate of the University Open Access Policy in 2016.
The UMass Amherst Libraries are pleased to endorse the MIT Framework for Publisher Contracts, a set of principles to guide library engagement with vendors and publishers, with the goal of advancing an open, equitable, and accessible scholarly ecosystem. The UMass Amherst Libraries are fully engaged in this process and espouse many of the principles set forth in the MIT Framework.
UMass Amherst Libraries will continue to work with our national and international colleagues as well as vendors, publishers, and learned societies, to create and advocate for change in the scholarly communications system. As mindful stewards of the financial resources entrusted to us by the campus and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, we will seek innovative and creative ways to provide access to needed resources in the most affordable and accessible way possible.
Endorsed October 21, 2019 by the University Libraries Administration Team: Simon Neame, Dean of Libraries; Steve Bischof, Associate Dean for Library Technology; Leslie Button, Associate Dean for Research and Learning; Terry Carroll, Director for Administrative Services; Sally Krash, Associate Dean for Content and Discovery; Carol Connare, Director of Communication; and Marilyn Billings, Advisor to the Dean of Libraries on Scholarly Communication.
The UMass Amherst Libraries announce the launch of Translat Library, a new journal based at UMass Amherst and published through ScholarWorks@UMassAmherst in collaboration with the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain. The journal is devoted to the literary culture of Europe from 1300 to 1600, with an emphasis on vernacular translations, the Romance letters, and the Latin tradition.
Translat Library stems from a long-term project led by a group of researchers based at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. The project, which has received funding from the Spanish government since 2006, culminated in 2018 with the publication of a monograph as well as a database on medieval Catalan translations (Translat is the medieval Catalan word for both ‘translation’ and ‘copy’).
Inspired by the sections of notes and manuscript excerpts that were common in 19th century journals, the journal aims to offer a venue for research based on archival and documentary work. It seeks to publish short articles documenting the identification of a manuscript or incunable, the source of a text, archival information on an author or work, the paratexts of a rare edition, the complete or excerpted edition of an unpublished text, and published but neglected text, among other topics.
Albert Lloret, Associate Professor and Director of Spanish and Catalan Studies at UMass Amherst, serves as general editor of the journal, together with Barcelona Professor Alejandro Coroleu. The Editorial Board is composed of a roster of scholars from the UK, Italy, Spain, and the U.S.
The W. E. B. Du Bois Center at UMass Amherst Libraries has been selected for the 2019 Best of Amherst Award in the Education Center category by the Amherst Award Program.
Each year, the Amherst Award Program identifies companies and places that they believe have achieved exceptional marketing success in their local community and business category. These nominees enhance the positive image of small business through service to their customers and community and help make the Amherst area a great place to live, work, and play.
The Amherst Award Program is an annual awards program established to honor the achievements and accomplishments of local businesses throughout the Amherst area. The organization works exclusively with local business owners, trade groups, professional associations, and other business advertising and marketing groups. Its mission is to recognize the small business community's contributions to the U.S. economy.
The University of Massachusetts Amherst today announced the acquisition of the papers of Daniel Ellsberg, one of the nation’s foremost political activists and whistleblowers. Following a decade as a high-level government official, researcher and consultant, Ellsberg distributed the top-secret Pentagon Papers in 1971, exposing decades of deceit by American policymakers during the Vietnam War.
The life work of Ellsberg, 88, as documented in an extraordinary collection of papers, annotated books and photographs, will be managed and made available to scholars and the public by Special Collections and University Archives at the W.E.B. Du Bois Library at UMass Amherst. Ellsberg, who holds a Ph.D. in economics and remains active as a lecturer and writer, will join the university community as a Distinguished Researcher at the Du Bois Library and as a Distinguished Research Fellow at the university’s Political Economy Research Institute (PERI).
A sampling of the collection can be viewed here. Official news release here.
Mondays
9:30-11 a.m.
W. E. B. Du Bois Library, Floor 22, W. E. B. Du Bois Center
Join the W. E. B. Du Bois Center for a weekly light breakfast and discussion of a text by or about Du Bois. All are welcome.
This series takes place every Monday except for the following dates:
Dec. 23
Dec. 30
Jan. 20
May 25
As of June 30, 2019, the UMass Amherst Libraries ended its subscription to Nexis Uni (formerly LexisNexis Academic). After analyzing cost, usage, technical considerations, existing subscriptions, and the needs of its patrons, the Libraries decided that its limited budget should be spent on resources that would better support research, teaching, and learning activities in the university and the community. With this decision not to renew the $62,000 Nexis Uni subscription—instead subscribing to new databases and adding to existing subscriptions—the Libraries saved approximately $43,350.50 without sacrificing access to the same or similar materials.
View the Libraries’ LibGuide for a full list of alternatives to Nexis offerings, including the following:
Westlaw is a user-friendly and comprehensive resource for legal research. It includes legislation, regulations, court and agency decisions, legal encyclopedias, and law reviews. The West Key Number System makes it easy to focus your research on a specific area of law. HeinOnline includes a wealth of historical and international legal materials. LegalTrac provides access to over 1,200 law reviews and legal newspapers, and the Topic Finder function allows you to visualize connections between search terms. In addition, the Libraries added campus-wide full-text access to Consumer Reports.
The Libraries have also subscribed to a great new resource, Access World News, which includes over 5,800 local, national, and international news sources, including newspapers, magazines, web sources, and transcripts. The Libraries continue to provide access to many newspaper databases, such as ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Additionally, the Library of Congress has digitized and made available a collection of historical American newspapers dating from 1789-1963 (Chronicling America).
The UMass Amherst Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center (DSC) is assisting Eric Poehler, associate professor of classics at UMass Amherst, in completing the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project (PALP), for which he received a $245,000 grant from the Getty Foundation.
The project is an online resource of images documenting existing artwork, such as frescoes and mosaics, in Pompeii, Italy. Embedded within these images are various types of metadata—data that provides information about other data—that describe the artwork as well as their locations in Pompeii, allowing scholars to search the database more easily and study the pieces within their architectural contexts.
The DSC is supporting this project by reviewing more than 150,000 images provided by Pompeii in Pictures and adding the metadata to them from Linked Open Data (LOD) resourced: publicly available, standardized data and terminology that interlinks with other data on the web to make searching easier.
“Contributing to the Pompeii Artistic Landscape Project really builds on the Digital Scholarship Center’s expertise with images,” says Brian Shelburne, director of the DSC. “It also allows us to develop new skills that we will use to support future projects by our students and faculty.”
Sunday, Sept. 1, 2019
7:30-10 p.m.
W. E. B. Du Bois Library, Lower Level
Join the UMass Amherst Libraries and UMass Information Technology for a fun evening of games, food, and prizes!
Sponsored by the UMass Amherst Libraries and UMass Amherst Information Technology.