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.
The 2025 University of Virginia Library User Survey results are in, helping us understand what matters most to our community. User surveys guide decisions about how our spaces are used, how our collections grow, and how we can support the research and learning needs of our students and faculty.
A new landscape
When the first user survey launched more than 30 years ago, the library landscape looked entirely different. Some libraries that once defined our system no longer exist, and electronic journals and books were not as prevalent as they are now.
The last library user survey was conducted in 2019, and the world — and the Library — have changed dramatically since then. From the impact of the pandemic to the renovation and reopening of Shannon library, the last few years have reshaped how our community studies, works and engages with library spaces.
As the end of the year approaches, we asked UVA Library staff to recommend their favorite books they read in 2025. The books could be any genre, published in any year, so long as they were available in UVA Library’s or the Jefferson-Madison Regional Library’s collections.
Take a look at our extensive list below, which includes everything from Jane Austen to Andy Weir, and check some books out for the holidays. Members of the UVA community can even request books ahead of time for easy access. Please note: the publication years listed correspond with the editions in our collections, not necessarily the original publication dates.
Happy reading, and come visit us at any of our six locations before we close for winter break (beginning Dec. 20 for some libraries) … or after we reopen January 2!
An estimated 2,000 people, from fourth graders to senior citizens, formed a line outside the Rotunda for a chance to view the “McGregor Dunlap broadside” copy of the declaration, one of two in the University Library’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. The copies are among just 26 originals known to still exist.
Hundreds of visitors lined up at the University of Virginia’s Rotunda on Monday, February 16 to view one of the nation’s earliest printed copies of the Declaration of Independence. The broadside on display is one of two copies UVA Library preserves.
The vault and the stacks at the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library hold romantic accoutrements that put chocolate-covered strawberries and a bottle of champagne to shame.
The McGregor Dunlap broadside is generally off display and secured in the library’s vault, preserving it for future generations of researchers. On Monday, Presidents Day, you can see it on display in the Rotunda.
