This Black History Month, librarians on the Arts & Humanities team invite you to explore stories of the African American experience from the past two centuries.
Featured in this post are two collections of primary sources for historical research, a biography of a Union Army soldier, and a history of the Freedman’s Bank by UVA history professor Justene Hill Edwards.
Dec. 10, 1938 - Herbert Friedman, a day shy of 14 years old, boarded a train in Austria bound for England. It was the eve of World War II, and he was one of nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, who were rescued from Nazi-controlled territory across Europe.
A UVA Today story tells the tale in more detail, as Friedman eventually made his way from London to the United States, where he studied to be a pharmacist, fought for the U.S. in World War II and the Korean War, and started a family.
Eighty-seven years after Friedman’s departure from Austria, his personal effects — including the number assigned to him on that fateful train — were gifted to UVA Library by his sons.
This week,the UVA Library received the 2025 Library Excellence in Access and Diversity (LEAD) Award from Insight Into Diversity magazine, the largest and oldest diversity and inclusion publication in higher education. The LEAD Award honors academic libraries’ programs and initiatives that encourage and support inclusive excellence and belonging across their campus. These include, but are not limited to research, technology, accessibility, exhibitions, and community outreach. The Library will be featured, along with 33 other recipients, in the March 2025 issue of Insight Into Diversity magazine.
The Athenian “Agora” of the classical period of the 4th and 5th centuries BCE — the business, legal, and political center of the city — has been much studied by archaeologists. But its history in the middle Byzantine era, from roughly the 9th to the 12th century CE, has been relatively overlooked. Associate Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology Fotini Kondyli is working to change that. Kondyli bemoans the reputation of Byzantine Athens as an “insignificant town that lacks monumental structures and any urban planning … a backwater of the Byzantine empire,” and with the help of the Library’s Digital Humanities (DH) Center, she makes the case that the city during the Byzantine period was vibrant, densely populated, and much more prosperous than previously imagined.
The Cavalier Daily — the University of Virginia’s student newspaper — has been recording UVA history and student life for 134 years, since it was founded in 1890 under the name College Topics. Now, more than 7,500 pages of that history are available online, as staff from the UVA Library’s Preservation Services and Digital Production Group worked with the Library of Virginia to add the first 25 years of College Topics to Virginia Chronicle. Virginia Chronicle is a resource from the Library of Virginia that provides free access to digitized images of over 4 million newspaper pages. The College Topics archive, from Vol. I, No. 1 of January 15, 1890 to Vol. XXVII, No. 64 of June 14, 1916, represents a run of 1,270 issues and 7,663 pages.
UVA Library’s reference team had a busy 2024 as it moved into the renovated Shannon Library and welcomed eager visitors. In April, the month of Shannon’s grand opening to the public, a record-breaking 113,000 people visited the library, and with that surging foot traffic came increased desk inquires for the reference team.
“At UVA Library, reference services are available to any person who walks in our doors or lands on our website,” said Mandy Rizki, one of the three Reference Librarians in Shannon Library.“In the course of a day, all kinds of members of the University community stop by the reference desk, use our online chat, call us on the phone, or send us an email at library@virginia.edu.”
Walk-up reference service is offered in Shannon for all general Library inquiries and in the Albert and Shirley Small Library for specific questions about the unique items in Special Collections.
The piece below comes to us from UVA instructor Charlotte Matthews. Reflecting on her time in Alderman (now Shannon) Library, Matthews helps us feel the warmth of an old library; now new again.
“All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, except for the written word.” - Leonardo Da Vinci
In the first year of the COVID pandemic, when the world had come to a standstill, UVA Library’s Digital Production Group took on a new project: familiarizing themselves with the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative (FADGI). The initiative is a collaborative effort by federal agencies “to articulate a common sustainable set of technical guidelines, methods, and practices for digitized and born digital historical, archival and cultural content,” according to its mission statement.
The Digital Production Group (DPG) is responsible for the creation and preservation of the Library’s rare and unique digital holdings. Stacey Evans, an Imaging Specialist and Project Coordinator; Eze Amos, a Technical Lead; and Christina Deane, Manager of the DPG, worked togetherto make sure that the DPG was adhering to the guidelines set forth by FADGI. Evans, a photographer who has nearly 30 years of experience working in digital imaging, especially focused on the realm of cultural heritage imaging — capturing and documenting special and historic objects.
Volumes from the McGehee Miniature Book Collection including (inset) “Medieval Craftsman,” the 10,000th volume in the collection to be cataloged.
In 2005, Caroline Brandt, collector and co-founder of the Miniature Book Society, made a major gift to the UVA Library of her miniature book collection. Named in honor of Brandt’s first husband, UVA alumnus C.
In January 2025, the UVA Library is starting an annual reading challenge that will explore one author a month through a novel or short stories. Every year will feature a new theme.
From Sherri Brown, Librarian for English, and Amy Hunsaker, Librarian for Music & Performing Arts:
We’re excited that for the inaugural reading challenge in 2025, we will dive into Gothic literature written by women authors, beginning with an early Gothic novel written in the 18th century and moving chronologically to end with contemporary 21st-century Gothic fiction.
On Dec. 10, 1938, on the eve of World War II, Herbert Friedman boarded a train in Austria bound for England. It was the day before his 14th birthday. He joined nearly 10,000 children, virtually all of them Jewish, who were rescued from Nazi-controlled territory across Europe and taken to the United Kingdom. His son, University of Virginia alumnus Mark Friedman, has donated materials documenting his father’s remarkable life to UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.
Rare Book School at the University of Virginia's 2025 schedule includes more than 40 classes, featuring online courses and in-person possibilities. In-person courses in Charlottesville will be offered in the University of Virginia's newly renovated Edgar Shannon Library. For the best chance of being admitted on the courses, applications should be submitted by February 17.
If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading a story by Alice Berry, let me introduce you to her work.
The University of Virginia’s massive library system, which houses copies of the Declaration of Independence, is just part of her “beat,” one of the many areas she is responsible for covering.
Her storytelling task ballooned as the school undertook the gigantic overhaul of Shannon Library. In her story on one of UVA's last card catalogs, Alice revealed tantalizing details about issues of UVA’s student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, dating back to the 19th century. Her piece even inspired UVA Today’s latest installment of Obscura, which documents lesser-known objects and places across Grounds.
After a nearly four-year closure for renovations, Shannon Library has re-established itself as the University of Virginia’s main study spot. This December marks a full academic year since five floors of expanded seating and a grilled cheese café joined historic reading rooms and the checkered entrance hall students first crossed back in 1938.
This week,
We’re excited that for the inaugural reading challenge in 2025, we will dive into Gothic literature written by women authors, beginning with an early Gothic novel written in the 18th century and moving chronologically to end with contemporary 21st-century Gothic fiction.