The recently opened Edgar Shannon Library is busy and bustling with the beginning of the semester, and the space is also enlivened by new art throughout the building. The art is part of the Art in Library Spaces (AiLS) initiative, designed to create inclusive artistic spaces for the University and Charlottesville communities and strengthen the UVA Library’s presence as a place of belonging for all. AiLS is currently focused on Shannon Library but will bring art into all the buildings in the University Library system. The initiative is steered by the AiLS Standing Committee, co-chaired by Library Associate Dean for Inclusion, Diversity, Equity & Accessibility Catalina Piatt-Esguerra and Curator of Material Culture in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library Meg Kennedy, and made up not only of Library staff but also members of the arts community at UVA and in the surrounding area.
In partnership with UVA Arts, the Library’s Art in Library Spaces committee welcomes proposals for artistic works to be displayed in Shannon Library’s second floor gallery. Faculty and staff at UVA are welcomed to apply, and the selected recipient(s) will receive $5,000, paid to their department to fulfill the project.
Here I present my selection of books to celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month (Sep. 15 – Oct 15, 2024). Six books are included in this list; one inspirational for UVA’s own Latino community; another two describe a current painful reality for the Latino community in the U.S., and three of the books celebrate the literary and vital creativity of Latino writers and poets. Enjoy!
The University of Virginia Library has six locations; an array of cozy study spaces; millions of books, journals, videos, newspapers available for checkout or browsing; and new resources arriving each day. And did you know we also offer events ranging from exhibitions to concerts for UVA and the Charlottesville community throughout the year?
Below, check out five upcoming events for those who love crafting, bookbinding, spatial mapping, and more. All Library events are free.
UVA Library is celebrating a major milestone: the books in Shannon Library’s stacks are now fully moved in and available to patrons. Each floor in Shannon (aside from the basement and second floor) has two stacks locations — Stacks West and Stacks East.
In observation of Disability Pride Month this July, the Library would like to highlight a number of resources exploring disability justice and activism that we hold in our collection, including anthologies and essays, memoirs, a primary source database, and an introduction to core concepts in disability studies. The quoted text is from each book’s publisher.
Charlotte Hoopes had no idea what open educational resources (OER) were until she had to build an introductory business course from scratch in 2021, her first year as an assistant professor in the McIntire School of Commerce*. The cost of business case studies and simulations consumed her class budget, leading her to discover free, “open” textbooks. As she delved into the world of OER, she discovered resources and grants through UVA Library that allowed her to create her own open textbook specifically tailored for her class. That textbook is now available worldwide, and has been used by more than 1,000 students.
June is here and Pride Month is upon us again! This is the month when we honor queer history and the Stonewall Uprising of 1969 in Manhattan, New York, that set an already-burgeoning gay rights activist movement into high gear. Here in Charlottesville, we get to celebrate Pride twice! Once in June and again in September, when our town and the University celebrate Pride with the full involvement of UVA students.
This month Reference Librarian Mandy Rizki is highlighting a handful of the many library resources that focus on LGBTQIA+ lives, experiences, and fields of scholarship.
In 2023, the Library was the grateful recipient of a major gift — a collection of humor and illustration, mainly of social and political satire — from retired attorney Josephine Lea Iselin, a noted collector of illustrated books, prints, manuscripts, and ephemera. The collection, housed in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, is relevant to fields ranging from art and literature to political science, history, and media studies, and will find broad use in research, instruction, exhibition, and outreach.
Here, we take a close look at just a few of the more than 900 items in the Iselin Collection of Humor.
In 2018, UVA administrators decided they would take on one of the most challenging renovations in school history: expanding, reorganizing, and overhauling Alderman Library.
Rare Book School at the University of Virginia has received a $3.1m donation to endow a full-time curatorial chair for the School’s teaching collection and exhibitions program. It represents the largest single gift in Rare Book School’s 41-year history.
Last spring, UVA Library acquired 16 letters from Faulkner to his mother written while he traveled through Europe in the fall of 1925. The collection is widely considered to be the largest and most important group of correspondence by the author to become available on the market in decades.
UVA has plenty of ghost stories, passed down across generations by faculty, staff and alumni in writing and by word of mouth. Shannon Library, formerly Alderman Library, has been a hotbed for them.
