Six years ago, the United Nations General Assembly created 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) that sought “to end poverty and hunger everywhere; to combat inequalities within and among countries; to build peaceful, just and inclusive societies; to protect human rights and promote gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls; and to ensure the lasting protection of the planet and its natural resources.” A bit more ambitious than your weekend to-do list. They did, however, give themselves until 2030.

The OER working group is excited to announce our first grant, awarded to Andrew White for his open textbook, Deep Learning in Chemistry and Materials Science. The textbook examines Deep Learning, a specialized form of artificial intelligence, and its applications within the field of chemistry. White, who teaches Chemical Engineering at the University of Rochester, has been working on the textbook for the past nine months.

The short answer is no. The longer answer is that Open Educational Resources (OER) represent a subset of Open Access (OA) material. OER are always Open Access, but not all OA materials are considered OER.

Open Access materials incorporate all types of information that are freely available to the public. This can include pre- and post-prints of scholarly journal articles, data that has been shared widely, and images whose copyright has expired. These materials can be used as provided but do not include permissions to change the content.

We’re getting back into our time machine to revisit the 2012 University of Rochester board retreat. Last time, we looked in on how Evans Lam met Mary Ann Mavrinac, vice provost and Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly dean of the University of Rochester Libraries. This time, we’re dropping in on when Mavrinac met another trustee, Carol Karp ʼ74, Pʼ11.

Looking only at the past five years, Americans have caused each other, specifically those who belong to the Black, Asian American and Pacific Islander, and LGBTQ+ communities, a lot of pain. Here are a few moments you likely remember:

June 11, 2016—A gunman kills 49 and wounds 53 in an LGBTQ+ nightclub in Orlando.

May 26, 2020—During an arrest, a police officer in Minneapolis kneels on the neck of 46-year-old Black man George Floyd until he dies.

Nothing has been as easy as it should be during the pandemic. COVID-19 has turned life’s “difficult” knob to an uncomfortable level, and we’ve only started to see some relief—an experience that has also been made more difficult by the Delta variant. For most of the last year and a half, simple tasks have carried a phantom weight, and naturally challenging work has taken on Sisyphean characteristics. So, when someone isn’t just doing their job but excelling at it, they seem not of this world.

In the summer of last year, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) needed a new editor for their bi-monthly scholarly research journal, College & Research Libraries. The ACRL publications coordinating committee formed a search committee, including University of Rochester committee member Kristen Totleben, humanities librarian for the River Campus Libraries.

Not all knights wear armor—some wear overalls. And some carry a plunger instead of a sword. And some are also named Mario.

A month ago, if you asked the University of Rochester community to name the libraries’ search and discovery function, you would have been asking a trick question. There wasn’t one. However, you still would have gotten answers.