News, announcements, updates, and happenings in the UVA Library

The University of Virginia Library has six locations, an array of cozy study spaces, millions of items available for checkout or browsing, and new resources arriving each day. And did you know we also offer events throughout the year ranging from exhibitions to concerts for UVA and the Charlottesville community ?

Join us at the Library this spring for craft workshops, writing and editing support, zine tutorials, and live music. All Library events are free.

For a full listing of Library events, check out our public calendar.

On Presidents Day 2026, the University of Virginia hosted a special event, “Declaration Under the Dome” in the Rotunda as part of the University’s ongoing UVA250 celebration. For one day only, UVA Library staff members moved an original 1776 copy of the Declaration of Independence from its secure vault in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library to the Rotunda Dome Room for public viewing.

When Lucy Bassett was a child, her mother had a makeshift darkroom in their family’s basement. “We’d be folding laundry and also hanging pictures on the clothesline,” she said. Bassett stayed interested in photography and recently wove it into her work as a professor of practice in public policy at UVA’s Batten School. 

At UVA, Bassett serves as an expert in children and caregivers in humanitarian contexts, working to improve early child development outcomes. In the aftermath of a 7.8 magnitude earthquake that shook southeastern Türkiye and northern Syria in February 2023, Bassett became concerned about the 2.5 million people, many of them children, who were displaced by the disaster and were now living in crowded container camps. 

In late January, Dean of Libraries Leo Lo kicked off UVA Library’s new “Ethical Dimension of AI Literacy” series, which, this spring, will feature numerous presentations by AI scholars from across the University. Lo’s talk, titled “Memory Without Origin: Provenance, Consent, and Trust in the Age of Generative AI,” was originally scheduled to be held in the Shannon Library Seminar Room but because so many people registered for the event, it had to be moved to a larger location — the auditorium in Harrison/Small, just outside the Special Collections Library. 

This turned out to be a perfect setting, as Lo’s talk focused on archives and the importance of protecting them from AI services that could “ingest” them. “Think of all the sensitive materials donated to archives — letters, personal items,” Lo said, gesturing to the Special Collections vault nearby. “Academics care about citation and evidence. Archivists care about context. If we do not set enforceable boundaries for AI use in cultural heritage archives now, we will lose provenance and then lose trust.”

It’s Love Data Week! This week we’re featuring guest contributors from the Library’s Research Data Services team. Today’s post comes from Joe Edgerton, Research Data Management Librarian. 

It’s Love Data Week! This week we’ll be featuring guest contributors from the Library’s Research Data Services team. Today’s post comes from Laura Hjerpe, Senior Research Data Management Librarian. 

As a librarian who has worked with data in government and academia for almost six years, I find myself experiencing mental whiplash. The federal government was making big strides in making data open, at least through policy and legislation, but since the beginning of 2025, we have witnessed removals and redactions of federal government data and information, in a manner notable for its abruptness and impact. 

This February marks 100 years since the first national commemoration of Black history in the United States. The Association for the Study of Negro Life and History launched Negro History Week (spearheaded by Carter G. Woodson) in 1926. Sixty years later, U.S. Congress designated February as Black History Month. 

Below, several UVA librarians recommend books, databases, and videos that investigate the significance of the Black experience throughout American history and beyond.

There are more than 13 million manuscripts held and maintained by UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library (along with hundreds of thousands of maps, rare books, photographs, broadsides, and more) but the majority of those documents have not been digitized or transcribed. This is typical in the world of special collections libraries; the National Archives online catalog, for example, contains more than 455 million digitized pages of records, but that’s just a small percentage of the 13.5 billion total pages held there. 

Transcribing primary source documents is time-consuming and requires expertise in deciphering handwriting, recognizing antiquated spelling and abbreviations, and understanding obsolete punctuation, letters, and symbols. Equally important is having a grasp of the historical context of the document being transcribed.

The idea was simple but ambitious: stage an “ABCs” exhibition spotlighting UVA Library collections, entirely curated by Library staff. The exhibition would showcase the breadth of the Library’s holdings, and also serve as a welcome for new University Librarian and Dean of Libraries Leo Lo, who was set to begin at UVA just days before the opening. 

The UVA Library provides access to approximately 5 million books, 3 million e-books, nearly 500 journals, and more than 1,000 databases. That amount of available scholarship might feel overwhelming to someone sitting down to write a paper or begin a research project, but a handy tool can help students, faculty, and researchers alike quickly navigate and locate the specific information they need. Library subject guides (also known as LibGuides or just “Guides”) are carefully curated research companions organized by subject and created by librarians — think of them as a digital version of talking to an expert in any field of research.