Five Reasons to visit the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library

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.

Five Reasons to visit the Fine Arts Library:

1. Accessibility to all. Recent renovations have added gender-inclusive, wheel-chair accessible restrooms to the library’s main and second floors! All four bathrooms are spacious and private with single-user locks. While there is no elevator, there is wheelchair access to the second floor through the Architecture School.
2. Reservable spaces. Spaces are available for study groups, job interviews, planning sessions, consultations, practicing skits, and working on art projects. In the Materials Collection Room you can spread out your project work, study architectural building materials, or just meet up with friends. The Conference Room (mini-board room) is ideal for group study and club meetings. And the R-Lab is a creative collaborative space perfect for forums, presentations, and group discussions.
3. Robust collection. New books arrive daily — current periodicals with timely scholarship in the areas of art, architecture, urban planning, archeology, and indigenous studies, and large folio volumes containing glorious images. Architectural building materials (including design samples, from flooring to insulation to windows to green insulation blocks made from dead fungi) are housed in the Materials Collection room, and the library’s reference section contains the complete “Corpus Vasorum Antiquorum,” detailing the shapes of vases.
4. Creative tools. The library has high-end scanners connected to Macs equipped with Reaper and Unity programs (useful in creating video games and general visual rendering), and the Harris Matrix program for archeologists diagraming stratum.
5. Study carrels for graduate students. The Fine Arts Library has 44 reservable study carrels that may be checked out for the academic year and can be renewed each year. These assigned desks are used by grad students to study and store books. There are carrels which are still available for the spring semester!

Have a research question? Please feel free to make an appointment with Research Librarian for Architecture Rebecca A. Coleman, or Art, Archaeology, Classics, and Indigenous Studies Librarian Lucie Stylianopoulos. And do come and visit, whatever you are studying, and discover why you just might make Fiske Kimball your personal go-to library! See maps and directions to all Library locations.