Healey Keynotes

Accessibility Resources

The Curriculum Resource Center (CRC) has collaborated with the Equity & Excellence in Higher Education committee for the past two years to focus on Universal Course Design. This collaboration has resulted in the CRC obtaining the following resources:

Boardmaker Software

• "The premier software among educators for creating printed symbol-based communication and educational materials”.
• It is a graphics database that can be used to build a Communication Board in any language.

Braille/Print Children’s Books

• The CRC receives 12 Braille / Print children’s books a year, through the National Braille Press book-of-the-month club. Each book has print words and illustrations, with an overlay of Braille.

Kidspiration and Inspiration Software

• "Strengthens critical thinking, comprehension and writing across the curriculum".

Kurzweil 3000 software

• Can convert most PDFs to readable documents (for students with visual impairment or blindness)
• Enlarges words on the screen
• Has sophisticated Screen Reader
• Scans and digitizes print documents, making them screen readable

Math Window

• “Math Window consists of a magnetic board and tiles that allow blind students to build and solve math problems”.

In addition to the tools above, a resource map, Accessibility Resources at UMB, is now available at the Healey Library in print, Braille and large print, thanks to the Equity & Excellence committee (Carol DeSouza, Ginny Perelson, Kirsten Behling, Lori Mateljan, Marilyn Day, Stanley Dick, Tikeon Sealey, Valerie Carroll & Valerie Haven).

Please visit the Equity & Excellence website, to find information about Universal Course Design at UMB, such as:

• Introductory Universal Course Design video (filmed at UMB)
• Tutorials explaining how to incorporate UCD strategy into a course
• UCD instructional tools, technologies, assessment, resources & environmental strategies

Accessibility Resources

The Institute for Community Inclusion (ICI) at UMass/Boston has produced a brochure entitled: ACCESSIBILITY RESOURCES AT UMB 2007-2008. This brochure was created as part of a grant-supported committee at ICI called "Equity and Excellence in Higher Education", you can visit the website here: http://www.eeonline.org. Marilyn Day, Supervisor of the Curriculum Resource Center at the Healey Library and Shannon McCue, Gopen Fellow at the Institute for Community Inclusion (both members of the E&E committee), compiled the information for the brochure. Graphics and layout were done by Dave Temolini at ICI. If you would like more information, please contact Marilyn at 617-287-5945; Marilyn.Day@umb.edu. 

Truth and Reconciliation

On October 23, 24, & 25, John Joseph Moakley Chair of Peace and Reconciliation of the McCormack Graduate School of Policy Studies will sponsor a conference entitled, Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: Do They Do Justice to Justice?. Representatives from Guatemala, El Salvador, Chile, and South Africa will share their lessons for Northern Ireland and Serbia. For more information on the conference see the listing of events at the McCormack School and UMass News.

The library currently has a display on the 2nd floor of books about the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions and the countries who are participating in the conference.  A selection of these books is listed to the right of this post and on the Healey Library wikispace. A complete list is available on LibraryThing and a reading list of articles is available here.   

New Library Resident

Late last spring, the Massachusetts Studies Project (MSP) began to share office space on the 5th floor, in order to collaborate more closely with Curriculum Resource Center on educational initiatives and with the Healey Library Archives on issues around the cultural heritage materials we're documenting.

Joanne Riley is the director of the MSP, which is part of the Institute for Learning and Teaching in the Graduate College of Education here at UMass and is co-sponsored by the Healey Library, along with the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities.

The mission of the MSP is to ground educators and students in their own communities through local history, local culture and local environmental studies.  One initiative of the MSP, managed by Heather Cole, is the Mass. Memories Road Show. It is a cultural heritage project where Massachusetts communities are visited, and people are invited to share photos and stories. The photos are scanned and the stories are recorded at a public event, then everything is added to an online database. The goal of the project is to visit all 351 communities in Massachusetts.

UMB Professor corrects the Library of Congress

UMB History Professor Spencer Di Scala discovered an error in a Library of Congress subject heading while searching WorldCat. Professor Di Scala was doing research for his book on Filippo Turati, one of the founders of the Italian Socialist Party, when he found that Turati was cataloged as a Communist by the Library of Congress. He further discovered that Anna Kuliscioff, another founder of the Italian Socialist Party, and Turati’s lover was cataloged similarly. Professor Di Scala was shocked to find the error because the two Socialists were vehemently anti-Communist. He explains the significance:

They and their allies founded the Italian Socialist Party and faced many crises together.  In 1921, the left wing of the Party broke off and established the Italian Communist Party.  Turati and Kuliscioff had opposed the Communists (and before them, the left wing of the Socialist Party) and Turati consistently denounced them for errors in tactics that he believed would lead to disaster (which, indeed, turned out to be the case).  The two groups were fierce rivals and after Benito Mussolini took power in Italy and the death of Kuliscioff, Turati escaped into exile in France where he was the moral leader of the Socialist opposition to Mussolini—and attacked by the Communists. 

This crucial error led Di Scala to contact WorldCat who checked the records and contacted the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress corrected the subject headings and WorldCat promised to change all the records in their database. This correction affects thousands of libraries because the Library of Congress creates subject headings, which are used in libraries around the world and WorldCat services over 10,000 libraries worldwide.