President Freeman Hrabowski has been supportive of Retriever Essentials since its inception. Through his leadership and the UMBC community’s contribution, just last year Retriever Essentials distributed 367 food bags to our deserving students, staff, and faculty members in need. Similarly, 410 meal swipes were donated to the students experiencing food insecurity, in 2019. This and much more has been possible with the constant support from his office and all of you.

Please view our president's message here and support Retriever Essentials like you always do.  

On the third annual UMBC Giving Day, please help Retriever Essentials reach its goal of 100 donors this year!
 
We hope your commitment to provide food and other essentials items to UMBC members in need will continue to multiply. This Giving Day join us in the #Blackandgoldrush. On February 27^th, Thursday, please visit https://givingday.umbc.edu to make a gift for Retriever Essentials. No matter the size, your gift will help Retriever Essentials improve food and basic need access in the UMBC community.

Facebook link is available here. Please feel free to share and spread the message. 

UT Southwestern is launching a new postdoctoral fellows program called the PROVIDES Program.  PROVIDES stands for Provost’s Initiative for Diverse Emerging Scholars.

The PROVIDES program is focused on increasing the diversity of the postdoctoral community at UT Southwestern and, importantly, supporting the successful transition of these postdoctoral fellows into independent faculty positions.  We are seeking qualified early-career scientists who have recently earned their PhD degree or who will earn their PhD degree prior to the start of the PROVIDES program with the goal of pursuing research and training that will lead to the successful pursuit of a tenure-track faculty position. Applicants will be selected on their intellectual strengths, research experiences, and career goals, as well as their ability to enrich the demographic and intellectual diversity at UT Southwestern. 

PROVIDES fellows will begin their appointment at UT Southwestern between June 1 and September 1, 2020.

Additional information, including information on the application process, can be found at www.utsouthwestern.edu/provides.

This program is being directed by Dr. Russell DeBose-Boyd http://www4.utsouthwestern.edu/moleculargenetics/pages/debose/lab.html  and Dr. Nancy Street https://www.utsouthwestern.edu/education/graduate-school/about-us/diversity/.

This semester, the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery, will be suspending its access to new titles in Kanopy. This change comes as a result of the unsustainable cost of providing unlimited access through an automatic licensing model. By the end of the fall semester, we had fully expended the amount that was allocated to Kanopy for the entire year.

Kanopy's pricing model for libraries was based on views per title. Once a title was viewed three times for longer than 30 seconds on the fourth viewing we were charged a licensing fee of $150 for one year of access.

We understand and respect how popular streaming media is and that it can be an invaluable instructional resource. We regret having to make this change. But we could not sustain our access to Kanopy. Until the licenses expire, users will still be able to watch and stream all of our currently licensed films in Kanopy (approximately 307 titles).

UMBC is not alone in having made this difficult choice. Many libraries have either dropped their Kanopy collections or are working with Kanopy to provide access to a very limited collection. We will be working with Kanopy to see if a limited access collection might be feasible.

Other options for streaming and viewing video

We have a number of other streaming video platforms available to the UBMC community. For a complete list, please see our Resources for Streaming Media guide

We also have an extensive DVD and Blu-Ray collection. The titles are listed in our Library Catalog and are also browsable in the 2^nd floor of the Albin O. Kuhn Library & Gallery.

Are you ready to make some money and enter The UMBC Financial Literacy Enthusiast Contest? 

Prizes you can win:

• 1st – $250 campus card deposit
• 2nd – $100 campus card deposit

What are you waiting for?

Click on the link to learn more about this great opportunity!

• February 10, 2020: Announcement sent to campus
• March 27, 2020: Deadline for submitting the CRI application via the DoIT web form
• April 10, 2020: Notification to chairs/directors of award recommendations from the review committee
• April 17, 2020: Feedback from chairs/directors on the award recommendations
• April 22, 2020: Review by the deans of the awards list
• May 1, 2020: Awards are announced
• May 31, 2020: Deadline for awardees to make their computer options selection
  
• Early June 2020: Computer order will be placed

As part of our ongoing commitment to security, the Unix Infrastructure group will be conducting its quarterly system patching on Friday, February 21st and Saturday, February 22nd.  While many of the systems will be patched without any service disruption, there are some systems which require the downtime of key services.  The schedule below outlines which key services will be offline and for how long.

Friday, 02/21/2020 between 4pm and 8pm (most systems will only be down for a short period during this time): 

• Between 4pm and 5:30pm only: LDAP-Master and Webadmin will be taken down for system maintenance.  During this time account creations and password changes will be unavailable.  Account authentication and logins will not be affected.
• The web hosting environments (virthost) will be partially unavailable (pages will be available but any database calls will not work)
• Access to Cyrus and UMBC Webmail (accounts not migrated to UMBC Gmail)
• All mail will be queued up and delivered after the server is patched
• All HFS (user) servers will be offline
• Certain software licenses will be unavailable (autodesk, cadence, idl, schrodinger, xilinx, mathematica)

Saturday, 02/22/2020 between 9am and 11am(most systems will only be down for a short period during this time):

• myUMBC lite page will be up resulting in reduced myUMBC functionality
• Wiki will be unavailable
• The sites (wordpress) web hosting environment will be unreachable

Please let us know if you have any concerns or questions.

Thanks!

Tim Champ

Manager of Unix Infrastructure

UMBC DoIT

We’re excited to announce our graduate scholarship program is back! Between now and February 14, 2020, at 11:59 p.m. ET, Sallie Mae is accepting applications from future and current graduate students for a $20,000 Bridging the Dream Scholarship for Graduate Students. Four inspiring students will be awarded $20,000 each for their graduate or professional degree.

Do you know an upcoming or current graduate student who:

• Has a dream they want to achieve with their degree?
• Has an interesting story to tell?
• Could use financial help to further their education?

This #BridgingTheDream Scholarship Program supports our mission of helping people reach their next goal. You can also help even more students find scholarships with our free Graduate School Scholarship Search at SallieMae.com/GradScholarships. It matches students with scholarships based on skills, activities, and interests.

¹ No purchase necessary. Void where prohibited. Valid 1/3/20 at 12 p.m. ET – 2/14/20 at 11:59 p.m. ET. See official rules athttps://bridgingthedream.scholarsapply.org/information.php.