After years of planning, renovation, and construction, UVA’s main library opened for business in January 2024 and celebrated a new era with a grand celebration and ceremony in early April in which the building was dedicated as The Edgar Shannon Library, named for UVA’s fourth president.
The day of the celebration, Library staff welcomed thousands of guests for an open house, with library areas and departments on display. Activities included interactive demonstrations, special presentations of Library collections, virtual reality, tours, musical performances, and more. Public remarks celebrating the library and President Shannon’s legacy were made by University Librarian John Unsworth, UVA President Jim Ryan, State Senator Creigh Deeds, Vice Rector Carlos Brown, Professor Larry Sabato, Professor Emeritus Jerome McGann, and Lois Shannon, daughter of President Shannon. Those speeches were recorded and can be viewed on the Library’s YouTube channel. The day’s celebration concluded with a public reception in the library’s new Z Society Reading Room.
A photoessay of the day’s events can be seen below. And if you haven’t yet had a chance to visit Shannon, feel free to contact us for a tour!
Shannon Library was decked out in festive fashion for the day, both inside …
… and out.Even Edgar Allan Poe had his party hat on.Library staff greeted a constant flow of visitors in Memorial Hall.Multiple displays and interactive presentations were held throughout the building. Here, Education and Social Science Research Librarian Ashley Hosbach-Wallman shows off materials from the Library’s Children’s and Young Adult Collection.Nawang Thokmey (left), Librarian for Tibetan, Buddhist, and Contemplative Studies, with materials from the Library’s extensive Tibetan Collection.A virtual reality demonstration, held during the Scholars’ Lab open house.Project Processing Archivist Elizabeth Nosari printing a keepsake (“I made an impression at the new Shannon Library”) in Rare Book School’s second floor offices.Sue Donovan, Conservator for Special Collections, talks to a group in the Special Collections Conservation Lab.Guests took advantage of tours, which were held throughout the day — here Principal Cataloger Jean Cooper shows a group through the building.Self-styled as “the first, the only a capella group for the musically challenged,” the Virginia No-Tones gave a fun performance in one of the two new study courts. Student bluegrass group Hoograss also performed.Lois Shannon speaks to assembled guests about the new library, her family’s time at Carr’s Hill, and her father’s legacy.A plaque commemorating Edgar Shannon, which now hangs in the fourth-floor south entryway. Under Shannon’s leadership, UVA became a truly public university, fully integrating and welcoming women to Grounds, and Shannon steadied the University through a turbulent and volatile era in the late 60s and spring of 1970. A scholar of Victorian literature and noted authority on Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Shannon was also a professor in the English department, both before, during, and after his term as president.Guests at the closing reception, held in the Z Society Reading Room, just inside the new second-floor north entrance to the building.
