Category Archives: Mason Faculty/Staff

Oberle to receive 2022 Distinguished Library Faculty Award

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The Libraries is pleased to announce that George D. Oberle III – history librarian, director of the Center for Mason Legacies, and assistant term faculty with the department of history and art history – has been selected to receive the 2022 Distinguished Library Faculty Award. With this award, he is recognized by his library faculty peers for his exemplary professional accomplishments and his dedication as a librarian, historian, scholar, and mentor.

In the snapshot that follows, you will find it no surprise that Dr. Oberle has been called “the most extraordinary librarian I have ever known,” esteemed for his “unflagging work ethic and amazing degree of intellectual curiosity,” and applauded for the literal transformation of Mason’s campus brought about by such projects as the Enslaved Children of George Mason and Black Lives Next Door.

Oberle is a longtime member of the George Mason University community. He began his career with the Libraries as a graduate research assistant in the reference department of Fenwick Library. Since then, he has held several librarian faculty appointments. Having earned his BA and MA in history at Mason, and his master of library science from the University of Maryland (College Park), Oberle returned to his history studies at Mason and earned his PhD in 2016, while working full-time in his librarian role. His dissertation focused on “Institutionalizing the Information Revolution: Debates over Knowledge Institutions in the Early American Republic,” and he is currently working on an adapted book manuscript, Forge of Learning: Institutions of Knowledge in the Early Republic.

By his colleagues in the Libraries, George is named “one of the best librarians I have ever worked with”; praised for never losing sight of the clear role and value libraries and librarians play; known for his “passion for primary source materials” and his consistently high research consultations numbers; and credited for his mentorship of many students, library staff members, and librarians.

By his faculty colleagues across the university he is known as a “distinguished scholar, an eminent practitioner in the field of library sciences, and a caring and devoted educator” committed to student success. His impact on both the instructional and research activity of the history department over the years is “difficult to overstate” and he consistently goes above and beyond, with the result that he is viewed not only as a contributor of valuable resources and information but as an integral and vital part of the history department being able to do their work. By his faculty colleagues outside of the Mason community, he is known as a “wonderful, supportive colleague whose passion for history and education has shaped the experiences of thousands of people.”

Dr. Oberle’s leadership contributed to the founding of the Center for Mason Legacies, which has been recognized at Mason and beyond on the regional and national level. Such work has culminated in his selection for the nationally competitive American Library Association’s I Love My Librarian Award earlier this year.

Please join the Libraries in commending George Oberle for his contributions to the George Mason University Libraries, the George Mason University academic community, and the broader scholarly community, and please join me in congratulating him on his selection by his peers to receive the University Libraries’ Distinguished Faculty Award in 2022.

The award will be presented officially to Dr. Oberle at Mason’s annual Celebration of Teaching Excellence ceremony, hosted by The Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning. This year’s ceremony is scheduled for May 2, 2022.

New exhibition in Fenwick Gallery,“Conjuring Presence,” featuring Mason students, faculty, alumni

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Fenwick Gallery at George Mason University is pleased to host “Conjuring Presence,” an exhibition of visual art and poetry featuring Mason students, faculty, and alumni. The exhibition will run in Fenwick Gallery and online from October 20 through December 11, with a literary reading and an artists’ panel to be announced at a later date.

Curated by Mason faculty member and artist Jessica Kallista, “Conjuring Presence” asks both artists and audience to think critically and examine many manifestations of presence: What does it mean to join our creativity as we co-sense and conspire together for the sake of enlivening our imaginations and our communities? What does it mean to become mindful of the need to work against erasure when we understand who is not present and why? Who decides whether some people are or are not allowed to be present to occupy spaces in the arts and academia? How do we acknowledge the past, work for a just future, and still ground ourselves in the present? How might we work to conjure presence? 

The artists and poets featured in “Conjuring Presence” were paired and asked to consider these questions throughout the collaborative process. In doing the work of considering, questioning, and challenging the status quo with radical honesty and presence of mind, together they embrace the power to envision, freedom dream, and co-create otherwise worlds into existence.

This exhibition is co-curated by Heather Green (Asst. Professor, School of Art) and Stephanie Grimm (Art and Art History Librarian and Fenwick Gallery Manager), with exhibit support from Chen Bi (Fenwick Gallery Graduate Assistant). Exhibition support is generously provided by the University Libraries, School of Art, and Creative Writing Program at Mason.

“Conjuring Presence” will be on display in Fenwick Gallery and online. Fenwick Gallery is located in Fenwick Library on Mason’s Fairfax campus. The gallery is open during Library business hours; see the Library’s website at http://library.gmu.edu for the most accurate and up-to-date information.

For more information on this exhibition at Fenwick Gallery, contact Stephanie Grimm, Art and Art History Librarian, at sgrimm4@gmu.edu.

Center for Mason Legacies releases “Black Lives Next Door” preliminary findings

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The Center for Mason Legacies (CML) invites you to explore their newly created digital project, Black Lives Next Door: George Mason and Northern Virginia in an Age of Disparity and Opportunity (BLND). Building on work that began in 2020, BLND is presenting its first set of findings and inviting our community to take a journey through our “pasts next door” and related stories. Read the full announcement here.

About the Center for Mason Legacies: CML is an interdisciplinary and collaborative research center established by the University Libraries and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences. CML’s mission is to preserve and examine the legacy of George Mason IV (1725-1792), his ancestors and heirs, and the people he enslaved. Learn more about the center here and their various research projects here.

FRAME II awarded $1,175,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

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“Federated Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education II” awarded a $1,175,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

By law, any material required for the education of a disabled student must be made accessible for them in a timely manner. In the United States, the legal obligation to provide accessible learning materials falls on individual educational institutions, and universities and colleges across the country are scrambling to meet their responsibilities to students with special information-access needs. The staff of disability services offices (DSOs) spend a great deal of time and effort remediating printed texts, transforming them into a variety of electronic formats to improve access for students with print disabilities. Because many of the same texts are commonly assigned at multiple institutions, the result is a wasteful duplication of effort as the DSO staff at each independent university must start the remediation work over again.

For the last two years, the University of Virginia Library has led a multi-institutional project to address this problem. With a two-year grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, University Librarian John Unsworth initiated an effort to create a web-based infrastructure allowing DSOs to share remediated texts, in order to reduce their nationwide duplication of effort, and thereby make it possible for the staff in these offices to achieve better outcomes for students in higher education.

That collective effort, known as “FRAME,” will now continue for another two years and expand to include new partners, thanks to a grant of $1,175,000 from The Mellon Foundation for a second phase dubbed “Federated Repositories of Accessible Materials for Higher Education II.” Representatives of the DSO and library staff at Ohio State University will join their counterparts from George Mason University, Northern Arizona University, Texas A&M University, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Wisconsin, Vanderbilt University, and the University of Virginia, along with a development and project management team based at the UVA Library. Much of the group’s work will concentrate on expanding and improving EMMA (Educational Materials Made Accessible), a membership-based secure repository for remediated texts, and developing workflows wherein librarians and DSO staff will cooperate in uploading texts to the repository.

“For too long, most academic libraries have left accessibility to their colleagues in disability services, even though it is all about providing information resources for teaching and research. The FRAME project seeks to establish a partnership between libraries and disability service offices, to ensure that remediated content is preserved, organized, and made discoverable for re-use, reducing the duplication of staff effort in order to improve service to students (and faculty) with disabilities,” states Unsworth, who is continuing his role as principal investigator from the first FRAME grant.

Also continuing to support the project will be three major digital repositories: Bookshare, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive. Through a federated search interface, these repositories provide EMMA users with texts that have already been remediated for users with print disabilities or that are machine-readable and suitable for further remediation by DSO staff — a big advantage over having to scan a printed book. Benetech, the parent company of Bookshare, supplied much of the search infrastructure for EMMA in the first phase of the FRAME project and has committed in the second phase to sharing certain cutting-edge technologies to automate parts of the labor-intensive remediation process. In the second year of FRAME II, an additional repository will join the collaboration: the Accessible Content e-Portal sponsored by the Ontario Council of University Libraries.

Another important element of the project is the cooperation of the university presses affiliated with six of the participating universities: George Mason, Illinois, Ohio State, Vanderbilt, Virginia, and Wisconsin. As publishers of texts that might be used in higher education, the presses have all committed to contributing machine-readable versions of their publications to EMMA or one of its federated repositories.

John Unsworth is joined by FRAME II co-principal investigator J. Stephen Downie, Associate Dean for Research at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences. Professor Downie will lead a new educational initiative, developing curricular materials for professional education in library schools. The materials created by Downie and a team of expert collaborators will train library and information professionals in the information needs of students, faculty, and other library users with disabilities. Professor Downie states, “It is truly inspiring to be working with all the project partners at Illinois, Virginia and beyond to realize the promise of the FRAME II vision.”

Read more about the project’s beginnings in 2019 and Mason’s involvement.

Invitation to Mason faculty to join the conversation on Sustainable Scholarship

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Virginia’s seven public academic research libraries (George Mason University, along with University of Virginia, Virginia Tech, Virginia Commonwealth University, College of William and Mary, James Madison University, and Old Dominion University) will soon be at the contract negotiating table with Elsevier, the largest STEM scholarly publisher, in an effort to reduce our shared access costs to the Freedom Collection, Elsevier’s flagship academic journal bundle.

Our shared Elsevier contract represents a collective yearly expenditure of $10 million and is scheduled to expire on January 1, 2022, with five percent inflation in the final year of the contract. In light of substantial budget cuts and ongoing fiscal uncertainty – as well as the unsustainable models favored by large publishing conglomerates who control access to academic journals – Virginia universities are considering our next steps for both cost reductions and future sustainability.

In preparation for these negotiations, we are implementing UnSub, an analysis tool that will help us make sound, data- informed decisions about the value of the Elsevier Freedom Collection and our other journal packages. The data we collect, along with additional information about sustainable journal collections, will be made available to the university community on our website throughout the fall. For an example of one large university system’s effective use of UnSub, see this recent Science magazine article.

We know that any changes to the way we share and access information affects our entire academic community. Our faculty are key partners in making any necessary changes, and we welcome your input. If a successful outcome is not reached through negotiations, we – and our partner universities – will continue our common commitment to delivering the resources students and faculty need to do their research and academic work.

We invite you to attend the upcoming Sustainable Scholarship Virtual Forum on Friday, October 2 at 9:30 a.m., where VRL members will share information about the group’s collective priorities concerning equity, accessibility, and the costs of bundled scholarly journal packages.

We have collated some resources about sustainable collections and journal pricing on our Sustainable Collections site. We hope you will find this information, particularly the “Six Things Faculty Need to Know”, helpful. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have additional questions.