Through January, we’re publishing year-in-review highlights from FY2021. Download a full PDF of this year’s Annual Reportto read more! For this final story, we encourage you to “visit” us—wherever you are—through a new virtual Walking Tour.
The Library’s new online resource “Gender: Identity and Social Change” examines the history of gender in the English-speaking world, beginning with coercive enforcement of gender roles in the nineteenth century and moving through twentieth century activism toward a more inclusive reality. The experiences of people, both famous and unsung, reveal how views of gender have impacted women’s suffrage, feminist movements, employment and the workplace, personal conduct and manners, and education and legislation.
Guest post by Fine Arts Library Public Service Manager April Baker
Just off Rugby Road and behind the Fralin Museum of Art, the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library is located in Campbell Hall, home to UVA’s School of Architecture. Built in 1970, Campbell Hall was recently added to the Virginia Landmarks Registry. The Fine Arts Library, with its sunny spaces lit by floor-to-ceiling windows, is where artists, architects, dancers, actors, art historians, and students come to study and meet.
Katrina Spencer, Librarian for African American & African Studies: Hey, Lucie, tell us about some of the notable works in our collection that address Indigenous Studies.
The Library is now offering full online access to the New York Times to everyone in the University community!
Create a FREE account and you’ll get all the Times’ content, including world news, politics, opinion, business, the arts, book reviews, the New York Times Magazine, as well as Spanish and Chinese editions and hundreds of articles published in other languages. To create your account from off-Grounds locations, users need to have their VPN turned on.
Once your account is created, the VPN is no longer needed.
Guest post by UVA Librarian for Music & the Performing Arts Amy Hunsaker
The Music Library has been described as a fishbowl, with its Byzantine-inspired blue carpet squares and arched ceilings. It is very quiet there, except for music that occasionally wafts through from a rehearsal or music lecture. Quirky, hidden study spaces are tucked behind walls of books. It is perhaps the most unique library on Grounds and is worth a visit — if you can find it.
There have been a lot of news stories in the past few years about the “big deals,” academic publishing, and its relationship to journal access in higher education, including here at UVA. And it’s true: what’s happening now is, well, a big deal; one that will affect the way we publish and read for decades to come. This article focuses on three aspects: tools you can download and utilize to make for easier access, processes we’ve put in place on the back end to ensure your access is uninterrupted, and opportunities that have come from this unique moment. If you’re new to this effort, you could start with the Library’s information about Sustainable Scholarship, see recent news stories about the “big deals,” or if you’re familiar and ready for next steps you can jump straight into how you can help.
The Library has the entire backfile of Rolling Stone magazine in the Rolling Stone Archive — now available in the Library’s A-Z Databases list from its beginning to the present: full-color scans, full-page content, cover-to-cover, including articles, editorials, and advertisements, with article-level indexing and searchable text.
- Guest post by UVA Library Special Collections Conservator Sue Donovan
On September 12, 2020, the time capsule underneath the “At Ready”/“Johnny Reb” statue in front of the Albemarle County Courthouse came out of the ground after crews had carefully removed the tons of granite and bronze sitting over it. The time capsule, a copper box containing papers, books, and other artifacts, had been placed into a hole in the concrete foundation. The foundation had expanded over time, pressing in on the sides of the thin copper box, and causing the box lid to pop off. This meant that the time capsule had been soaking in groundwater since slightly after it was buried in 1909. Silt from the groundwater colored the water brown, coated the exterior of the contents, and effectively acted as an adhesive between the surfaces of once-distinct books and rosters. As the water level rose, the contents of the time capsule became bathed in a malignant microcosm perpetuated by a mixture of the inherent acidity of the paper, the metal of the box itself, and nature’s ultimate solvent: water.
The Library online resource "Caribbean Newspapers, 1718-1876" features publications from 22 islands, covering 150 years of Caribbean history (most of the 18th and 19th centuries) in more than 140 fully searchable titles. These documents provide valuable insights into the islands’ sugar cane plantocracies and the traffic in African lives that fueled the empires of colonizing countries England, Spain, France, and Denmark.
"Caribbean Newspapers" is an essential source for research in:
When Andrew Spencer and SuLing Llanes-Trexler met, it wasn’t quite a meet-cute.
The fourth-year students at the University of Virginia met while working in the UVA Library’s Digital Production Group. Although their supervisor, Rob Smith, nudged Spencer to introduce himself, their friendship took time to develop.
The University itself also has a noteworthy space to learn more about zines — the Zine Bakery project within the Scholar’s Lab, on the third floor of Shannon Library.
The College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at UVA has announced that it will receive a $2.04 million grant from the Mellon Foundation for the Julian Bond Papers Project. The investment will accelerate efforts to digitize, annotate and publish the vast archive of civil rights leader, educator and activist Julian Bond. The manuscript collection is housed at UVA's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.
