Get your news here! Libraries news subscriptions available for the Mason community

In addition to the Libraries’ numerous databases containing historic newspapers and past issues of news journals, did you know that we also have a number of direct news subscriptions for current issues? These include the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Business Journal, and more!

With the Libraries’ subscriptions, Mason faculty, staff, and students can set up accounts with select news sources and avoid hitting that pesky paywall or maxing out your limited articles per month. You can also sign up for email alerts to get timely and relevant news delivered right to your inbox (check out this feature for the Washington Business Journal!).

For a list of our direct news subscriptions, with information on how to access them and/or set up individual accounts, visit our News infoguide at https://infoguides.gmu.edu/news. The guide also contains a tab listing our major news databases – sites that collate news from a variety of sources and which are typically updated daily.

George Mason University librarian receives I Love My Librarian Award

For Immediate Release
Mon, 01/10/2022

Contact: Macey Morales, Deputy Director, Communications and Marketing Office, American Library Association, mmorales@ala.org

George Oberle recognized with national public service honor 

CHICAGO – George D. Oberle, director of the Center for Mason Legacies, history librarian, and assistant term professor at George Mason University (GMU), is a winner of this year’s I Love My Librarian Award. Recognized by the American Library Association (ALA) for his amplification of historically underrepresented voices and the dedication he brings to uncovering and teaching about hidden histories, Oberle was selected from more than 1,300 nominations from library users across the country. 

Applying his dedicated scholarship in history and his commitment to social justice, Oberle has transformed his campus community and its understanding of GMU’s and its namesake’s racial history through his work establishing and leading the Center for Mason Legacies (CML), an interdisciplinary and collaborative research center housed in the university’s Fenwick Library that seeks to preserve and examine the legacy of George Mason IV, his ancestors and heirs, and the people he enslaved. 

Oberle’s work with the CML has culminated in numerous educational resources for the GMU community, including a robust website with an array of primary source materials and a memorial recognizing the individuals enslaved by George Mason in the center of campus. As his nominators note, “By his example and his accomplishments, George has shown that what starts as a small library project can indeed grow into an important asset supported by the entire university.” 

“Dr. Oberle’s work with the Center is remarkably pointed and relevant to these times as he and the team work towards uncovering our hidden histories, expanding our historical record and knowledge of both the past and the present, documenting current racial tensions, and seeking a more just future,” his nominators wrote. “He works directly in the spaces combatting erasure and suppression and inspires students and faculty alike as he does so. In these efforts, he embodies not only the time-tested tradition and unique role of libraries in society as knowledge-preservers, but also the knowledge-creation and discovery-learning traditions of research universities.” 

Oberle and this year’s nine other honorees will each receive a $5,000 cash prize, a $750 donation to their library, and complimentary registration to ALA’s LibLearnX. The virtual award ceremony will take place during the conference at 3:30 p.m. CT on Saturday, Jan. 22, 2022, and will be available to stream live at https://www.youtube.com/user/AmLibraryAssociation.  

Since the award’s inception in 2008, library users have shared more than 20,000 nominations detailing how librarians have gone above and beyond to promote literacy, expand access to technology and support diversity and inclusion in their communities. Information regarding previous award winners can be found on the I Love My Librarian website at?http://www.ilovelibraries.org/lovemylibrarian.? 

Carnegie Corporation of New York generously sponsors the I Love My Librarian Award. The New York Public Library also supports the award. ALA administers the award through its Communications and Marketing Office, which promotes the value of libraries and librarians.? 

About Carnegie Corporation of New York 
Carnegie Corporation of New York was established by Andrew Carnegie in 1911 to promote the advancement and diffusion of knowledge and understanding. In keeping with this mandate, the Corporation’s work focuses on the issues that Andrew Carnegie considered of paramount importance: education, international peace, and a strong democracy. 

About The New York Public Library 
The New York Public Library is a free provider of education and information for the people of New York and beyond. With 92 locations—including research and branch libraries—throughout the Bronx, Manhattan, and Staten Island, the Library offers free materials, computer access, classes, exhibitions, programming and more to everyone from toddlers to scholars, and has seen record numbers of attendance and circulation in recent years. The New York Public Library serves nearly 17 million patrons who come through its doors annually and millions more around the globe who use its resources at?www.nypl.org. To offer this wide array of free programming, The New York Public Library relies on both public and private funding. Learn more about how to support the Library at nypl.org/support. 

About the American Library Association 
The American Library Association is the foremost national organization providing resources to inspire library and information professionals to transform their communities through essential programs and services. For more than 140 years, the ALA has been the trusted voice of libraries, advocating for the profession and the library’s role in enhancing learning and ensuring access to information for all. For more information, visit ala.org. 

For more about this year’s award winners, read the press release here and visit the award site here.

Welcome to Mason Libraries – Fall 2021

Mason Libraries welcomes new and returning students and faculty to the Fall 2021 semester! We look forward to seeing you, and we are here to support your scholarly endeavors and to help you succeed in your studies, whether in-person or virtually. As we continue to inhabit a changing public health landscape, the best place to find out about our current services and any updates are our FAQs page, our Services Updates page, and our News blog, where we will communicate any updates or changes.

What to expect this fall

The Libraries continues to support the Mason community through a hybrid model of in-person and virtual offerings, with extensive electronic resources, including virtual workshops, instruction sessions, research consultations, and virtual reference service. As with the rest of the university, the Libraries has adjusted to operate safely during the COVID-19 pandemic and services may change at any time as conditions warrant.

Hours: Our hours have been updated for the fall semester and may change if needed.

Library Access: Through Monday, September 6, 2021, access to any library location is limited to Mason students, faculty, and staff. Signage will be posted to indicate the university’s Safe Return to Campus guidelines, and those who do not adhere to the university policies and guidelines may be asked to leave and may be subject to disciplinary action. As of Tuesday, September 7, 2021, the Libraries will welcome our Passport Program participants and other community members to resume in-person library visits. All who visit the Libraries should be wearing face coverings and should be prepared to show the results of their daily COVID health check.

Stacks: As of Monday, August 16, 2021, the stacks have reopened for in-person browsing, though patrons are still welcome to utilize our online request system if they prefer via their library account. If you encounter difficulty placing your request, please email fencirc@gmu.edu.

Study Spaces and Computers: To promote physical distancing and follow university guidelines, some tables, carrels, workstations, and chairs were removed or marked out-of-use in each library and building capacity was limited. As we begin the Fall 2021 semester, these spaces may change and capacity numbers have been increased. We continue to offer individual study rooms for use by reservation, and we will open up group study rooms for reservation as well. For those who prefer a distanced study space, please visit Fenwick Library’s 5th floor study space which has been designated for this purpose.

Furniture: With the start of the Fall 2021, the amount of distanced space will change as furniture is returned from storage. We ask you that not move or rearrange the furniture.

Food and Drink: No food and beverages are allowed in library locations, with the exception of water in a closed container. Please help us maintain clean and safe spaces by not bringing in food or drink. Face coverings should be worn at all times, unless actively drinking.

Further information about circulation, reference, and research services: Please review our current FAQs.

Health & safety protocols

Current status information

The Libraries will follow university and state guidelines. Our FAQs will be updated as needed. Responses are based on Mason’s Safe Return plan and current information. Responses and available services are subject to change.

General information on library services

Mason Libraries provides free 24/7 access to thousands of online resources for Mason faculty, students and staff – just use your Mason NetID and password. Visit library.gmu.edu to discover what the Libraries offer to support and enhance your learning, teaching, and research at Mason. Highlights include:

Questions? Please contact us at any time.

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

“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.

Library faculty recognized at Celebration of Teaching Excellence

Maoria Kirker and Wendy Mann were recognized at the 2021 Celebration of Teaching Excellence today, an annual event hosted by the Stearns Center for Teaching and Learning at Mason.

Maoria Kirker, Lead of the Teaching & Learning Team at the Libraries and adjunct faculty with the Honors College, received the Adjunct Teacher of Distinction Award. Teacher of Distinction commendations are awarded based on an instructor’s teaching innovation and excellence, commitment to their students, and mentorship activities, among other qualities. To read more about Maoria’s accomplishments and recognition from her students and colleagues, click here for an article written by Mariam Qureshi, Honors College Writing and Reporting Intern (and one of Maoria’s students).

Wendy Mann, Director of the Digital Scholarship Center, received the Distinguished Library Faculty Award. The Distinguished Library Faculty Award is awarded to a library faculty member in recognition of their professional accomplishments, embodiment of the Libraries’ organizational values, and support of the Mason scholarly community. To read more about Wendy’s accomplishments and recognition from her peers, click here for the Libraries’ announcement.