Sure, you can visit the University of Virginia Library to borrow books (we have more than 5 million of them!), to find a cozy study space, or even to use a 3-D printer, but did you know we offer events ranging from workshops to performances for UVA and the Charlottesville community throughout the year?
Below, check out five upcoming events for those who love music, science, crafting, and gaming. All Library events are free.
The Library Sustainability Working Group created a Sustainability Plan this year to support the University’s goals to “advance sustainability leadership and impact by incorporating environmental, economic, and equity considerations in decision-making” by 2030. The core group was made up of staff with a passion for sustainability representing various perspectives and expertise.
Guest post by Cecelia Parks, Undergraduate Student Success Librarian.
For Women’s History Month, we are highlighting the Collective Biographies of Women, a digital humanities project led by Alison Booth, Professor of English and Academic Director of the Scholars’ Lab. You can access the Collective Biographies of Women here.
Below, Booth answers questions about this massive project, which serves as a database of historical women as well as an annotated bibliography of more than 1200 books.
Q. How would you describe the Collective Biographies of Women (CBW) project?
We’re pleased to announce that the Women’s Maker Program has accepted its third cohort of Residents.
The Women’s Maker Program supports a makerspace program that’s designed to help increase Residents’ confidence and interest in STEM and makerspace technologies, improve their sense of belonging in the field, and better prepare them for future careers in the STEM workforce.
UVA has made a change in the way it serves proxy URLs for electronic resources. If you access electronic resources directly through links on the Library website (or through tools like JournalFinder or Databases A-Z), you do not need to take any actions.
If you have bookmarks to electronic resources, you will need to update those bookmarks. Please keep reading to understand how to avoid broken links when the old URLs are removed.
What is happening?
UVA is upgrading the server that enables faculty and students to access Library electronic resources from off Grounds.
The URL for UVA’s proxy server changed from proxy01.its.virginia.edu (or proxy.its.virginia.edu) to proxy1.library.virginia.edu. You will need to change all your bookmarks that use the old proxy. For example,
“Women Making Books,” a new exhibition in the First Floor Gallery of the University of Virginia’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, opens with Phillis Wheatley’s “Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral” (1773), the first published book of poetry by an African American. The book’s frontispiece engraving of Wheatley (who was enslaved by a Boston family) sitting at a desk with a quill in hand is likely well known to most English majors; it is believed to be the first portrait in American history of a woman writing.
American civil rights leader Julian Bond was known for many things. In 1960 he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and spent the next decade organizing student protests and voter registration drives across the South. He served in the Georgia legislature, co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, and eventually led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He also taught history at the University of Virginia from 1990 to 2012, leaving his papers to UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.
The Julian Bond Papers contain approximately 47,000 items, including speeches and articles written by Bond, correspondence, campaign materials, academic evaluations, and family papers. Bond donated his papers to the UVA Library in 2005 (he died in 2015). This past month, the collection made the news for different reasons.
Every year around this time, libraries, archives, and allied institutions and groups celebrate Fair Use Week, a time to recognize the power and importance of the fair use doctrine in our daily lives. Fair use is the First Amendment safety valve in copyright law, allowing use of in-copyright works without payment or permission when the use serves copyright’s purpose without intruding unfairly on the copyright holder’s commercial prerogatives.
This year we have two features from the University of Virginia Library’s Director of Information Policy, Brandon Butler:
First, a piece cross-posted with Harvard University about copyright (and, specifically, fair use) and its application in cases of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
Rare Book School at the University of Virginia's 2025 schedule includes more than 40 classes, featuring online courses and in-person possibilities. In-person courses in Charlottesville will be offered in the University of Virginia's newly renovated Edgar Shannon Library. For the best chance of being admitted on the courses, applications should be submitted by February 17.
If you haven’t yet had the pleasure of reading a story by Alice Berry, let me introduce you to her work.
The University of Virginia’s massive library system, which houses copies of the Declaration of Independence, is just part of her “beat,” one of the many areas she is responsible for covering.
Her storytelling task ballooned as the school undertook the gigantic overhaul of Shannon Library. In her story on one of UVA's last card catalogs, Alice revealed tantalizing details about issues of UVA’s student newspaper, the Cavalier Daily, dating back to the 19th century. Her piece even inspired UVA Today’s latest installment of Obscura, which documents lesser-known objects and places across Grounds.
After a nearly four-year closure for renovations, Shannon Library has re-established itself as the University of Virginia’s main study spot. This December marks a full academic year since five floors of expanded seating and a grilled cheese café joined historic reading rooms and the checkered entrance hall students first crossed back in 1938.
