John Unsworth served as University Librarian, Dean of Libraries, and Professor of English from 2016 to 2025.
The Library's 2025 annual report is the first to be produced only in digital form: the Library's tradition of producing these reports in print has finally been overtaken by increased prices for paper and postage. Nonetheless, I think you will find this report as readable, informative, and well-designed as its predecessors. This report also marks another transition — a change in Library leadership, with my retirement and the appointment of Leo Lo as the 17th University Librarian. Looking back at the list of University Librarians, I feel a special kinship with the 10th Librarian, Harry Clemons, for whom Clemons Library was named. Harry was the head Librarian from 1927-1950, he (like me) was a professor in the English Department, and he oversaw the original construction of Alderman Library, which we have just reimagined and renovated as Shannon Library. Harry also wrote a wonderful history of the UVA Library from 1825-1950, which is online for free in Virgo, the Library's catalog, and which I highly recommend. The foreword to that history was authored by Dumas Malone, the UVA historian who wrote the definitive (six-volume) biography of Thomas Jefferson. In that foreword, Malone writes:
Long years ago Jefferson said that the main objects of all science are the freedom and happiness of man. If in the middle of the twentieth century he were to visit the library he founded, he would be enormously impressed by the card catalogues in the entrance hall and fascinated by the projectors downstairs where he could read his own letters from microfilm. But he would be most pleased, I believe, to find that the institution is no mere matter of appliances and guides and indexes, not merely an aggregation of books and manuscripts, but a living organism dedicated to the enlightenment of free human beings. He would find the Alderman Library, as thousands of students and hundreds of scholars have found it, a free and happy place. In it, the riches of human knowledge are not jealously guarded by suspicious custodians, but they are gladly made available to all who seek truth and wisdom, and at every official desk there are helping hands. The same may be said of other libraries, but there is more sunlight in this one, more warmth and courtesy and sheer human kindness, than is commonly encountered.
I believe that the same is true today, as I pass the leadership baton to the 17th University Librarian, Leo Lo. Leo, may you also be greeted here with warmth and courtesy and sheer human kindness — by a Library staff eager to work with you, by faculty who appreciate your expertise and discernment, by students who embrace the Library as their own, by donors who share your vision of the future, and by colleagues who recognize the Library as a resource that benefits the whole of the University of Virginia. Here’s to the future!
