News, announcements, updates, and happenings in the UVA Library

This Black History Month, librarians on the Arts & Humanities team invite you to explore stories of the African American experience from the past two centuries.  

Featured in this post are two collections of primary sources for historical research, a biography of a Union Army soldier, and a history of the Freedman’s Bank by UVA history professor Justene Hill Edwards.

Dec. 10, 1938 -  Herbert Friedman, a day shy of 14 years old, boarded a train in Austria bound for England. It was the eve of World War II, and he was one of nearly 10,000 children, most of them Jewish, who were rescued from Nazi-controlled territory across Europe.

A UVA Today story tells the tale in more detail, as Friedman eventually made his way from London to the United States, where he studied to be a pharmacist, fought for the U.S. in World War II and the Korean War, and started a family.

Eighty-seven years after Friedman’s departure from Austria, his personal effects — including the number assigned to him on that fateful train — were gifted to UVA Library by his sons.

This week, the UVA Library received the 2025 Library Excellence in Access and Diversity (LEAD) Award from Insight Into Diversity magazine, the largest and oldest diversity and inclusion publication in higher education. The LEAD Award honors academic libraries’ programs and initiatives that encourage and support inclusive excellence and belonging across their campus. These include, but are not limited to research, technology, accessibility, exhibitions, and community outreach. The Library will be featured, along with 33 other recipients, in the March 2025 issue of Insight Into Diversity magazine.

The Athenian “Agora” of the classical period of the 4th and 5th centuries BCE — the business, legal, and political center of the city — has been much studied by archaeologists. But its history in the middle Byzantine era, from roughly the 9th to the 12th century CE, has been relatively overlooked. Associate Professor of Byzantine Art and Archaeology Fotini Kondyli is working to change that. Kondyli bemoans the reputation of Byzantine Athens as an “insignificant town that lacks monumental structures and any urban planning … a backwater of the Byzantine empire,” and with the help of the Library’s Digital Humanities (DH) Center, she makes the case that the city during the Byzantine period was vibrant, densely populated, and much more prosperous than previously imagined.   

The Cavalier Daily — the University of Virginia’s student newspaper — has been recording UVA history and student life for 134 years, since it was founded in 1890 under the name College Topics. Now, more than 7,500 pages of that history are available online, as staff from the UVA Library’s Preservation Services and Digital Production Group worked with the Library of Virginia to add the first 25 years of College Topics to Virginia Chronicle. Virginia Chronicle is a resource from the Library of Virginia that provides free access to digitized images of over 4 million newspaper pages. The College Topics archive, from Vol. I, No. 1 of January 15, 1890 to Vol. XXVII, No. 64 of June 14, 1916, represents a run of 1,270 issues and 7,663 pages.

UVA Library’s reference team had a busy 2024 as it moved into the renovated Shannon Library and welcomed eager visitors. In April, the month of Shannon’s grand opening to the public, a record-breaking 113,000 people visited the library, and with that surging foot traffic came increased desk inquires for the reference team.

“At UVA Library, reference services are available to any person who walks in our doors or lands on our website,” said Mandy Rizki, one of the three Reference Librarians in Shannon Library. “In the course of a day, all kinds of members of the University community stop by the reference desk, use our online chat, call us on the phone, or send us an email at library@virginia.edu.”

Walk-up reference service is offered in Shannon for all general Library inquiries and in the Albert and Shirley Small Library for specific questions about the unique items in Special Collections.

The piece below comes to us from UVA instructor Charlotte Matthews. Reflecting on her time in Alderman (now Shannon) Library, Matthews helps us feel the warmth of an old library; now new again.

“All knowledge which ends in words will die as quickly as it came to life, except for the written word.” - Leonardo Da Vinci

In the first year of the COVID pandemic, when the world had come to a standstill, UVA Library’s Digital Production Group took on a new project: familiarizing themselves with the Federal Agencies Digital Guidelines Initiative​ (FADGI). The initiative is a collaborative effort by federal agencies “to articulate a common sustainable set of technical guidelines, methods, and practices for digitized and born digital historical, archival and cultural content,” according to its mission statement.

The Digital Production Group (DPG) is responsible for the creation and preservation of the Library’s rare and unique digital holdings. Stacey Evans, an Imaging Specialist and Project Coordinator; Eze Amos, a Technical Lead; and Christina Deane, Manager of the DPG, worked together to make sure that the DPG was adhering to the guidelines set forth by FADGI. Evans, a photographer who has nearly 30 years of experience working in digital imaging, especially focused on the realm of cultural heritage imaging — capturing and documenting special and historic objects.

In 2005, Caroline Brandt, collector and co-founder of the Miniature Book Society, made a major gift to the UVA Library of her miniature book collection. Named in honor of Brandt’s first husband, UVA alumnus C.

In January 2025, the UVA Library is starting an annual reading challenge that will explore one author a month through a novel or short stories. Every year will feature a new theme.

From Sherri Brown, Librarian for English, and Amy Hunsaker, Librarian for Music & Performing Arts:

We’re excited that for the inaugural reading challenge in 2025, we will dive into Gothic literature written by women authors, beginning with an early Gothic novel written in the 18th century and moving chronologically to end with contemporary 21^st-century Gothic fiction.