Library News

Library skills class for credit debuts in spring

UTD students will have a chance to receive class credit by taking a new online Library Research Skills class (BIS 3190) that is being organized for the spring 2010 semester. The graded course is for one credit hour.

McDermott Library instructors for the eight-week course will be Ellen Safley, Ph.D., Senior Associate Librarian, and Loreen Phillips, Head of Information Literacy. Rhetoric 1101 and 1302 are prerequisites for BIS 3190 unless the requirement is waived by one of the instructors. 

Library adds SPARC for faculty authors

McDermott Library is a new member of SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), an advocacy group in support of open access to research. SPARC is an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries.

SPARC works to make faculty authors aware of their rights and provides a legal addendum that can be used to retain some of their rights as authors. Rather than having all rights, including copyright, go to a journal in a traditional publication agreement, with SPARC’s addendum an author is able to retain key rights. The SPARC Author Addendum is a legal instrument that modifies the publisher’s agreement and allows the author to keep certain rights to his articles.

The benefits for faculty authors include retaining the right to give copies to their classes, distribute it among colleagues, include sections of the article in later works, and place the article on a personal website or online repository. This enables the author to provide more exposure for his scholarly research.

Special Collections celebrates
advancement by staff members

Julie Allen joins her son, Thomas Allen, at a reception in
Special Collections to honor his recent doctoral degree

McDermott Library's Special Collections held a reception to recognize the recent doctoral degree received by staff Curator Thomas Allen. The well-wishers included his mother, Julie Allen, former Administrative Services Officer for UTD Academic Affairs and the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost.

Thomas Allen joined the staff in 2003 as a Curator. His Ph.D. degree earned at UT Dallas is in Public Affairs. His dissertation title was "Local Governments as Interest Groups: The Case of Base Realignment and Closure Commission Process." He received a Master of Library Science degree from Indiana University and a Bachelor of Arts degree in European history (18th and 19th Century British History) from Chapman University in Orange, Calif.

Also, Patrizia Nava recently passed the four-hour archival certification test given by the Academy of Certified Archivists. She is now a Curator and a Certified Archivist. She received an Archive and Museums Management Certificate from UT Arlington in 2007. She came to Special Collections in December of 2003 as a casual laborer who translated German language documents into English.

Curator and Certified Archivist Patrizia Nava
joins Thomas Allen at his Ph.D. reception