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:
New! The Library offers full issues of Time and Life magazine online, cover to cover with all pictures and ads intact. Click “Research” at the top of the Library homepage. Look in the A–Z list of online resources to find the Time Magazine Archive or Life Magazine Archive. At the EBSCO search page, type search terms. All results will be from that publication.
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)
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.
