American civil rights leader Julian Bond was known for many things. In 1960 he helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and spent the next decade organizing student protests and voter registration drives across the South. He served in the Georgia legislature, co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, and eventually led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He also taught history at the University of Virginia from 1990 to 2012, leaving his papers to UVA’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.
The Julian Bond Papers contain approximately 47,000 items, including speeches and articles written by Bond, correspondence, campaign materials, academic evaluations, and family papers. Bond donated his papers to the UVA Library in 2005 (he died in 2015). This past month, the collection made the news for different reasons.
Every year around this time, libraries, archives, and allied institutions and groups celebrate Fair Use Week, a time to recognize the power and importance of the fair use doctrine in our daily lives. Fair use is the First Amendment safety valve in copyright law, allowing use of in-copyright works without payment or permission when the use serves copyright’s purpose without intruding unfairly on the copyright holder’s commercial prerogatives.
This year we have two features from the University of Virginia Library’s Director of Information Policy, Brandon Butler:
First, a piece cross-posted with Harvard University about copyright (and, specifically, fair use) and its application in cases of artificial intelligence such as ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion.
The Milky Way Galaxy seen over the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array west of Socorro, New Mexico. (NRAO/AUI/NSF, Jeff Hellerman)
The U.S. military has shot down four aerial objects in recent weeks, most recently an unidentified object over Lake Huron on Sunday. As more attention is being paid to the skies in the wake of these events (as well as after a government report on unidentified aerial phenomena was released in 2021), it might not be considered too “out there” to speculate about the possibility of extraterrestrial life.
The reopening of the new main library, Alderman, is just under a year away, but Beth Blanton, Director of Collections, is already deep in the process of mapping the book move into the new space. “I realized I have more than 50 spreadsheets — I stopped counting — keeping track of the collections in the book move,” she said, reflecting on a process that directly involves more than a dozen Library staff members and will touch more than a million printed books.
The process involves a complex “staging” that starts at Ivy Stacks, where most of the books are currently shelved. Since items in Ivy Stacks are sorted by size to allow for maximum efficiency in shelving, they need to be fully reorganized and merged into a browsable order before returning to their shelf locations in Alderman and Clemons.
In his “Sonnet 116” William Shakespeare describes what he sees as the truest kind of love — the marriage of two minds.
“Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken.”
Librarian for African American and African Studies Katrina Spencerpresents film and book pairings from the UVA catalog and beyond in celebration of Black History Month 2023. Spencer takes a wide, diasporic view, highlighting actors, writers, and creators from the United States, Brazil, South Africa, and Guyana. You are warmly encouraged to explore additional films through our streaming film holdings on Kanopy, Projectr, and our resource guide managed by Media Collections Librarian Leigh Rockey.
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.
That was one of the first details Mary Catherine Dunnigan noticed as she entered the University of Virginia’s Shannon Library for the first time in decades earlier this month. Dunnigan, who recently turned 103, chose to celebrate her birthday by returning to the University, where she spent years working as a librarian and director of the Fiske Kimball Fine Arts Library. She began working there more than 50 years ago, in 1973.
Dr. Amanda Wyatt Visconti, Scholars' Lab Director, manages the Scholars' Lab Zine Bakery, a collection of zines available to students located on the third floor of Shannon Library. The Zine Bakery offers a space for connection through art, politics, and identity, in a way that is accessible to all students.
When Andrew Spencer and SuLing Llanes-Trexler met, it wasn’t quite a meet-cute.
The fourth-year students at the University of Virginia met while working in the UVA Library’s Digital Production Group. Although their supervisor, Rob Smith, nudged Spencer to introduce himself, their friendship took time to develop.
