Artificial Intelligence (AI)

On April 17, 2026, the Library and the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences announced the creation of the AI Literacy and Action Lab, a program meant to consider the complexities of AI in higher education head-on. 

Guest post from Jenn Huck, Associate Director of Research Data Services & Social, Natural, and Engineering Sciences. Huck assists researchers and teachers in identifying and accessing an array of numeric and geospatial data and is the liaison to the School of Data Science.

When Leo S. Lo began his tenure as University Librarian and Dean of Libraries at UVA in 2025, he learned that artificial intelligence (AI) companies were already running out of “training data” — open material across the internet (books, webpages, articles, spreadsheets, and more) to absorb into their generative models for content creation.

In late January, Dean of Libraries Leo Lo kicked off UVA Library’s new “Ethical Dimension of AI Literacy” series, which, this spring, will feature numerous presentations by AI scholars from across the University.

There are more than 13 million manuscripts held and maintained by UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library (along with hundreds of thousands of maps, rare books, photographs, broadsides, and more) but the majority of those documents have not been digitized or transcribed.

The University of Virginia Library was pleased to welcome Leo Lo as University Librarian and Dean of Libraries in September of this year. The Cavalier Daily, UVA’s student-run news outlet, talked to Dr. Lo in early October about his hopes for the future and experience so far at UVA. 

“Artificial intelligence systems are thirsty,” writes Leo S. Lo in a recent column for The Conversation, an independent news organization.