Supporting academics and education

The Library hosts two popular programs that directly support faculty projects and classroom planning. One — Research Sprints — provides a Library support team for an intensive period of research assistance. The other — Course Enrichment Grants — focuses on classroom support and the creation of assignments to enhance students’ abilities to seek, evaluate, manage, and use information and data in scholarly contexts. 

The UVA Library is partnering with the Library of Virginia to make freely available more than 12,500 pages of African American newspapers through the Virginia Chronicle portal, a resource currently offering digitized versions of more than 4 million pages of historical Virginia newspapers. The originals of the newspapers, all held in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, were first scanned by the Library’s Digital Production Group before being sent to the Library of Virginia with text created by optical search recognition (OCR).

The concept of making education more affordable is broadly supported in our community, and open publishing is one powerful way to increase access without raising costs to readers. That said, the reality of open publishing, where article processing fees and associated expenses can present a significant barrier to author participation, is another story. 

In February, at the direction of Dean John Unsworth, librarian Jenn Huck created UVA Library’s Government Information Data Rescue Guide, which links to trusted repositories that have created backed-up copies of U.S. government data.