Guest post by: Kennedy Castillo (UVA Linguistics MA, 2019), Lise Dobrin (UVA Associate Professor of Anthropology and Linguistics Program Director), Liam Donohue (UVA Anthropology and Environmental Science BA, 2019), Grace East (UVA Anthropology PhD Candidate), Edith Kachia (Visiting Fulbright Swahili TA, 2018-19), Jenny Lee (UVA English and American Studies BA, 2019), Dakota Marsh (UVA English BA, 2020), Jacob Nelson (UVA Linguistics BA, 2020), Will Norton (UVA Linguistics BA, 2020)
The renovated space includes flexible areas for individual and group study and research throughout the building, as well as new elevators, bathrooms, and stairwells, and all-new mechanical infrastructure.
Section perspective from west, looking east towards the Rotunda. HBRA Architects with Clark Nexsen, October 22, 2018.
Basement
Mechanical rooms and building storage will be located on the basement level, as will compact shelving and processing areas for Rare Books School and Library and Flowerdew Hundred closed collections.
The University of Virginia Library’s collection contains everything from the earliest printed materials to the Tibetan Book of the Dead to student-made advertisements for something called the “experimental university.”
These items, along with roughly 200 others, are now on display for a yearlong exhibition, “The ABCs of the UVA Library,” hosted in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.
Haphazard highlights, scrap paper bookmarks and schoolboy scribbles are often passed off as mere library book litter, but they can offer peeks into the past.
John Unsworth retired this month as university librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia after more than nine years in the role. We chatted with him about his career and the profession.
Heather Riser and Gayle Cooper, two librarians at Special Collections, helped confirm that eight books archivist Amanda Greenwood found had been in the Rotunda at the time of the fire.
