Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery

Looking to put the "recreational" back into your reading?

Look no further.

The Library now has a distinct collection aimed at offering the UMBC community varied, timely, popular fiction and non-fiction in an easy-to-browse location in the Library’s first floor rotunda. The titles cover a wide range of genres: literary fiction, science fiction & fantasy, mystery, romance, western, biography, and non-fiction.

The collection of 200 books will be supplemented until the collection reaches 400. After that, twenty titles will be rotated out for twenty new titles each month. The Reference Department will carefully select books that are of interest to UMBC students, staff, and faculty.

The collection circulates to current UMBC students, faculty, and staff. Patrons may borrow up to five titles from the McNaughton collection at a time. Each title circulates for twenty eight days, with one possible renewal.

Please send any questions or comments to:
Katy Sullivan, Assistant Head of Reference
Phone: 410-455-3604
Email: sullivan@umbc.edu

"Demystifying Archives and Special Collections Research"
Wednesday, March 11, 2009 12-1pm
Special Collections, Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery

Your first visit to an archives or special collections department can be a little intimidating...

What tools and guides are used to locate materials?

Why do researchers need to wear gloves??

UMBC's Special Collections Archivist will answer all of these questions and more so that you will be prepared to perform archival research with confidence!

Join us Wednesday March 11 from 12-1 in the Special Collections Reading Room, located in the Albin O. Kuhn Library through the Gallery on the 1st floor. For more information please contact Lindsey Loeper at: lindseyloeper@umbc.edu or x56290. (Food and drink are not allowed, thank you!)

UMBC now has trial access to Credo Reference, offering full-text, aggregated content from over 275 reference books from over 60 publishers, covering such subjects as medicine, art, technology, history and more. Credo continually adds new content in all subjects, with such notable recent additions as the Bridgeman Art Library Archive, with over 16,000 art images and the interactive Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia including Atlas. The collection includes encyclopedias, dictionaries and thesauri, as well as subject-specific titles.

This trial will run through April 9, 2009. For off-campus access, please login via VPN first (http://vpn.umbc.edu). Then follow the link under "News & Events" on the library homepage. For more info on remote access, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/services/remoteaccess.php

Please let us know what you think.

UMBC now has trial access to American History in Video, providing a collection of videos for the study of American history including commercial and governmental newsreels, archival footage, public affairs footage, and important documentaries.

This trial will run through May 16, 2009. For off-campus access, please login via VPN first (http://vpn.umbc.edu). Then follow the link under "News & Events" on the library homepage. For more info on remote access, please see http://aok.lib.umbc.edu/services/remoteaccess.php

Please let us know what you think.

I am pleased to announce a new release of Women and Social Movements in the United States, bringing the collection to over 35,000 documents from nearly 150,000 pages of full text.

You will notice there is new software architecture. The interface provides an entirely new way to search and browse the database. The database provider is making many changes to improve the site's accessibility and functionality.

This release adds two new document projects (for a total of 90 projects):
- How Did Women's Antislavery Fiction Contribute to Debates about Gender, Slavery, and Abolition, 1828-1856?, by Holly M. Kent
- How Did American and Japanese Gender Hierarchies Shape Japanese Women's Participation in the Transnational WCTU Movement in the 1880s?, by Rumi Yasutake

This release also introduces "document archives," which bring additional primary source documents to the collection. Like the document projects which have been in the collection all along, document archives are primary source documents organized by topic. The difference is that the archives contain less scholar commentary and more primary source documents, giving historians and their students the opportunity to form their own interpretation of the sources. In other words, the archives present primary sources without the pedagogical apparatus. Each archive is prefaced by just a brief introductory essay, but no abstract or annotated sources (as users will find in the more scholarly document projects).

The first document archive is featured in this release and was assembled by scholar Jana Brubaker. The archive focuses on Elizabeth Glendower Evans, a noted Boston reformer in the first third of the twentieth century. This archive contains 79 documents.

Please let us know what you think about these changes.