Librarian for African American and African Studies Katrina Spencer presents film and book pairings from the UVA catalog and beyond in celebration of Black History Month 2023. Black history month, Reading lists
The Library’s rich collection of visual resources related to the history of the University of Virginia reached a new level of accessibility in September 2021. That month, the digital library JSTOR included five public collections from UVA in a project to add high-quality images to its more than 1,900 journal titles. With the exception of Culbreth Theatre’s image collection of stagecraft props, the UVA images that were added to JSTOR’s Open Community Collections platform are all from the Library. The images are housed on web interfaces constructed by Metadata Librarian Ann Burns.
Two of the Library’s collections — photos of student graffiti captured from study carrels in the main library prior to renovation, and photos of regional and vernacular world architecture taken between 1959 and 2013 by UVA Professor of Architecture Robert Vickery — were featured in the 2020 Library Annual Report. The additional collections are the thousands of items in the Richard Guy Wilson Architecture Archive and the James Murray Howard University of Virginia Historic Buildings and Grounds Collection.
Measuring impact is a critical element of library work, and it often illuminates opportunities for improvement. The Library’s recent Graduate Student Survey is one such example and its findings echo results from the UVA-wide Student Experience in the Research University survey, which focused specifically on the graduate student experience during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the pandemic has been a complicating factor in all realms of graduate student life, it affected Library services a great deal during 2020 and 2021, and the responses in the Graduate Student Survey reflected that.
Three key patterns emerged through the surveys, presented here with representative comments:
First, graduate students wanted better outreach efforts to raise awareness of ways the Library can assist them throughout the course of their education, such as recommending purchases, using interlibrary loan, or engaging with specialty units like the Scholars’ Lab.
Applications are now being accepted for three Library programs: Research Sprints, Course Enrichment Grants, and Affordability & Equity Grants.
Course Enrichment Grants provide support to faculty who would like to enhance students’ abilities to seek, evaluate, manage, and use information and data, as well as create or improve on media-rich class assignments. Recipients receive a $2,500 award (as summer wages or to a research account) and dedicated support from experienced librarians, technologists, or other library staff.
The Central Gazette, established by brothers Clement Pynes McKennie and John Harris McKennie, was Charlottesville’s first newspaper, running from January 1820 until July 1827. A four-page weekly available at a subscription rate of $3 per year, the Central Gazette aggregated items of foreign and domestic news and posted articles and notices of local and regional interest. In the first issue, the publishers laid out the paper’s intended scope: “Besides detailing the general intelligence of the day, it will give a copious account of every transaction appertaining to Agriculture and the general prosperity of Virginia—her seat of learning, her emporium of Arts and her schools of Science.” The paper included marriage notices, obituaries, notices of items found or stolen, want ads, and advertisements for services and goods. The University of Virginia was an early advertiser; Proctor Arthur S. Brockenbrough posted a notice in the March 11, 1820 issue promising “liberal wages” for laborers willing to work at UVA.
Leo Lo, dean of libraries at UVA and special advisor to the provost on AI literacy, told VPM News, “There are efforts to send a more university-wide AI vision. But for the last several years, different schools have been experimenting, trying different things.”
University Librarian and Dean of Libraries Leo S. Lo finds it useful to sort AI answers into an “answer typography” of four broad types: factual, interpretive, constructive and strategic.
UVA Library is combining tradition with technology in an effort researchers say will help preserve and expand access to Guna culture for a global audience.
The UVA project took about two years and involved research in UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library; trips to Monticello, Montpelier and Highland; and working with the Jefferson School African American Heritage Center.
The Library of Virginia and the University of Virginia will host a talk in late September about the role libraries play in an increasingly AI-driven world.
