Join us for the grand opening!
All are welcome to join on Thursday, April 4 for a grand opening celebration of The Edgar Shannon Library!
An open house, with activities from various Library areas and departments, will take place from noon to 4 p.m. Activities will include interactive demonstrations, special displays of Library collections, virtual reality, and more!
Remarks will begin at 4 p.m., and speakers include University Librarian John Unsworth; UVA President Jim Ryan; State Senator Creigh Deeds; Vice Rector Carlos Brown; Professor Larry Sabato; Professor Emeritus Jerome McGann; and Lois Shannon, of the Edgar Shannon family.
Everyone is welcome to stay for a reception afterwards in the Z Society Reading Room on the second floor.
Events throughout the day include:
- Interactive virtual reality: The Mahler Chamber Orchestra
- All things data, with Research Data Services!
- Children's Literature Pop-up Library
- Digital Humanities at UVA Library
- Hands-on activities and technology demos
- Learn about unique items from the collections, with Library subject liaisons
- Open education: The future of learning
- Student life through the ages
- Student success with the Teaching & Learning team
- Take a tour of Shannon Library!
- Using the Library: Learn to reserve a room, print in the Library, and more
- Virtual Reality Demonstration
- Audiovisual Preservation: Open House
- Conservation and preservations labs: Open house
- Sustainability in Shannon Library
- Vandercook letterpress demonstration and collection display
- Virginia No-Tones Performance
- Grand Opening Public Reception
More events are still being added! See the full schedule, or learn more about the beautiful Edgar Shannon Library. We hope to see you on April 4!
An in-depth look at the new library
After being closed for nearly four years, Alderman Library — now The Edgar Shannon Library — reopened in early January, with 100,000 square feet of renovated space and 130,000 square feet of new construction replacing the previous stacks towers. Now that the semester is well underway, the library is already experiencing heavy traffic as users explore and enjoy the new building (check out this Cavalier Daily article for the student point of view). Photographer Tom Daly captured a few of the spaces on and just prior to opening day. In advance of our grand opening celebration on April 4, enjoy this photo essay of the renovated library!
Before and after: looking at the library pre- and post-renovation
In advance of the grand opening celebration of The Edgar Shannon Library on April 4, we’re taking a deep dive into historical photos of the building and comparing them with the renovated space today.
As a quick overview, the library renewal project, designed by HBRA Architects, began with a 100,000-square-foot renovation of the original, 1938 Alderman Library structure. The renovation also included the demolition of the Old and New Stacks, replaced with a 130,000-square-foot, five-story addition (with one additional level below grade) on the north side of the building.
A major goal of the renovation was to create a light-filled, easily accessible study space for our users, while bringing the library up to current standards of safety and service. At the same time, the Office of the Architect of the University and Facilities Management took great care to maintain the characteristics of the existing historic interior features, as the original 1938 Alderman Library, a Public Works Administration project, was a treasured landmark at the University.
For those wondering about the fate of all of those books in the Old and New Stacks, Shannon Library contains high-density shelving on the first and third floors, with conventional library stacks on floors 4 and 5. The number of volumes expected to be put in place in Shannon and Clemons (combined) over the next six months is 1.2 million. However, this isn’t the full capacity of the shelving, as UVA Library is making sure to allow for growth of the collection over the next several years.
Take a look at beloved library spaces, before and after the renovation, in the photos below.
Memorial Hall is the largest room in the library and was built as a memorial to the University’s first president, Edwin Alderman, after whom the library was originally named. (In February, the University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors voted to change the name of Alderman Library to The Edgar Shannon Library in honor of UVA’s fourth president.) As seen in the 1938 photograph, Memorial Hall originally housed the library’s card catalogs. The tall structure behind the librarians contained the Snead Book Conveyor, a delivery system that brought books from the closed stacks to the circulation desk.
The renovation restored Memorial Hall to look more like it did in 1938 than in 2019. Its vinyl tile and carpet was replaced with new linoleum tiles to match the original checkered floor. Workers restored the windows and light fixtures, replaced and expanded the exterior doors, and replaced the ceiling. A renovated hallway beside the new Service & Information Desk now leads patrons to open, light-filled stacks.
The McGregor Room houses the book collection of Detroit philanthropist Tracy W. McGregor — 12,500 items focused on American history, geography, and literature — that was donated to UVA Library in 1938. Located in the library’s east wing on the second floor, the McGregor Room, which originally opened for use in April 1939, was also the home to UVA’s Special Collections until 2004. In the black-and-white photo from 1978, Special Collections items are displayed in glass cases for exhibition. Today, the room is a popular study hub for students, and is affectionally referred to by some as the “Harry Potter Room.” The vault for the original Special Collections remains on the east side of the room.
Although the McGregor Room looks much the same as it did before the renovation, it was refreshed with a new HVAC system, restored windows, refurbished light fixtures, a refinished wood parquet floor, restored millwork paneling and built-in shelving, and a new acoustical plaster monolithic ceiling.
The nine-story “New Stacks” addition was added to Alderman Library in 1967. Architect J. Russell Bailey gave the New Stacks exterior a modern design, following the mid-twentieth-century trend of “emphasizing the clear expression of function and the use of modern materials,” according to the 2015 Quinn Anderson Alderman Library Historic Features Survey.
These stacks were torn down in the renovation and replaced with a new, 130,000-square-foot addition on the north side of the existing building. This addition includes a new entrance to the building located on University Avenue so that the library is no longer seemingly closed off to the outside community.
The 1967 New Stacks addition used columns (rather than a structural bookshelf system) to form the layout of shelves inside the building. As many alumni might remember, single-occupancy desks were placed along the walls, where students could peer out through small, slit-like windows.
The renovation included the complete demolition of not only the New Stacks, but of the 1938 Old Stacks and its adjacent wings as well. The new addition, built on the approximate footprint of the demolished areas, contains open stacks under clerestory windows, large reading rooms, and sun-filled study carrels on the north side of the building. One goal of the renovation was to bring as much natural light into the building as possible.
Located on the fourth floor in the east wing, the Reference Room, with its long tables and ample sunlight, is a popular study spot for students. In the renovation, workers restored the windows and the original checkered floor, provided a new HVAC system and new lighting, and added a new dropped ceiling of plaster and acoustic tile. The bookshelves, empty on reopening day, are now mostly filled with reference materials.
When the library first opened, this third-floor room was known as the Browsing Room and was designed for “the occasional and leisurely reading of magazines and of interesting books new and old,” according to a 1938 “Alumni News” story. Six varying types of light fixtures were designed for this space, including two hand-blown glass hurricanes attached to a decorative cast brass spine. Wherever possible, the historic, original light fixtures were refurbished during the renovation.
Today this room is the Graduate Student Lounge, available only to graduate students for a quiet place to study. The room includes a new kitchen lounge and locker area as well. Additional renovations to the room include restored windows and finishes; new flooring; a new plaster ceiling; a new HVAC system; and all new power, including new floor boxes. The journals and periodicals that were held in this space before the renovation can now be found in the Reference Room on the fourth floor.
Before the renovation, Alderman Library contained an open light court at its center, with a multi-story bridge connecting the north and south blocks of the building. This outdoor space was rarely used and often filled with leaves and debris.
One of the more dazzling aspects of the renovation was the transformation of this space into study courts, now located on the second floor of the library. To enclose the light courts, workers added a new stone floor on the second level of the building, restored the exposed brick walls, and capped the space with skylights at the fourth-floor level.
We hope you will join us on April 4 for Shannon Library's official grand opening and take a tour of the renovated building.
Sources for facts about the renovation:
The HBRA Architects with Clark Nexsen Preliminary Design/Basis of Design Report, 2018.
The Quinn Anderson Alderman Library Historic Features Survey, 2015.
Celebrate Women’s History Month on the big screen!
This year’s Women’s History Month blog post focuses on another big event that happens every spring: The Oscars! Below, librarians Anne Causey and Cecelia Parks share books, films, and archival material related to women involved in this year’s Oscar-nominated films and lesser-known women actors and filmmakers through Hollywood history.
“Filmmakers On Film: 2, Editors on Editing” (2014), directed by Ally Acker
Two of this year’s nominees for Best Film Editing are women: Thelma Schoonmaker, for “Killers of the Flower Moon”, and Jennifer Lame for “Oppenheimer.” This documentary features interviews with other prominent female film editors. These editors are part of a long tradition of women editors; though women have historically been excluded from many filmmaking roles, the editor role has been more open to them.
View “Filmmakers On Film: 2, Editors on Editing” in Virgo.
“Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance” (2018), by Christina N. Baker
Only five Black people were nominated for Oscars this year, two of whom are women. All were nominated for acting awards. Very few Black women have been nominated for non-acting Oscars, and even fewer have won. In her book, Baker analyzes the portrayal of Black women by Black women filmmakers such as Ava DuVernay, Tanya Hamilton, Kasi Lemmons, Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Dee Rees to explore how they create and recreate images of Black femaleness in their work.
View “Contemporary Black Women Filmmakers and the Art of Resistance” in Virgo.
“Go West, Young Women!: The Rise of Early Hollywood” (2013), by Hilary Hallett
Hallet focuses on early Hollywood and its appeal especially to women. Migrants, especially women, flocked to Hollywood, enticed by the dream of interesting work, romantic adventure, and the chance to reinvent oneself. In 1920, Hollywood had more women than men, unlike other western cities. Soon, women made up most of the audience and it followed that films catered to them. Without particular education or training, a woman could dream of becoming a Mary Pickford or a Gloria Swanson or any number of other women who had influence and power as writers, directors, actresses, producers, and publicists.
View “Go West, Young Women!: The Rise of Early Hollywood” in Virgo.
“Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll” (1994), by M.G. Lord
“Barbie,” directed by Greta Gerwig, has been one of the top films of 2023 and is nominated for multiple awards, including Best Picture. Lord’s “Forever Barbie” tells the story behind the doll that inspired the film, charting Barbie’s development, success, and her intersections with popular culture and feminist thought.
View “Forever Barbie: The Unauthorized Biography of a Real Doll” in Virgo.
“Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film” (2006), by M. Elise Marubbio
Lily Gladstone is nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role for her role as Mollie Burkhart in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which is about a series of murders in the Osage Nation in the 1920s. In “Killing the Indian Maiden,” Marubbio examines the portrayal of Native American women in films that preceded “Killers of the Flower Moon” and argues that Native American women have historically been depicted in self-sacrificial roles in which they align themselves with a white male hero and die.
View “Killing the Indian Maiden: Images of Native American Women in Film” in Virgo.
“Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood” (2018), by J. E. Smyth.
Smyth challenges the stereotype of studio-era Hollywood as an all-boys club that disenfranchised women. She sets out to prove that there were instead diverse opportunities open to women in the Hollywood of the 1930s and 1940s, enabling women to work as executives, directors, producers, writers, film and sound editors, make up artists, etc. It meant that Hollywood was actually ahead of many other industries in regard to women’s work and equality — women had significant power and influence in the film industry.
View “Nobody’s Girl Friday: The Women Who Ran Hollywood” in Virgo.
“Starring Red Wing!: The Incredible Career of Lilian M. St. Cyr, the First Native American Film Star” (2019), by Linda M. Waggoner.
This biography is about one of the earliest Native American women to star in the early film era. Between 1908 to 1917, she was in at least 70 silent films. Her best known roll was that of Naturitch in Cecile B. DeMille’s first film, “Squaw Man.” Red Wing, born on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska (officially Ho-Chunk) was a “writer, prop maker, costume designer, a cultural consultant and her own incredible stunt woman.”
“The Color Purple” (1982), by Alice Walker
Danielle Brooks is nominated for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for her portrayal of Sofia in the new musical film version of “The Color Purple.” The film is based on Walker’s 1982 novel, which tells the story of Celie, a young Black woman in early-twentieth-century Georgia. This Black queer classic won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1983. Trigger warning: this book contains themes of sexual assault.
View “The Color Purple” in Virgo.
“Regeneration: a Romance of the South Seas” (1923), produced by the Norman Film Mfg. Company
Eight un-numbered, illustrations or “posters,” of this silent film are housed in UVA’s Special Collections Library. White film maker Richard Norman established his company in Jacksonville, Florida, and created several films starring all-Black casts. Regeneration was his most successful — watched by white and Black audiences alike. The only female in the cast, Stella Mayo, was promoted as the “Sensational Colored Screen Beauty.” Mayo was new to the film industry and dropped back into obscurity afterwards. Only one reel of the film exists today, at the Library of Congress, though a clip can be found online.
Board of Visitors votes to name renovated library The Edgar Shannon Library
The University of Virginia’s Board of Visitors voted today to name the University’s newly renovated main library The Edgar Shannon Library, in honor of UVA’s fourth president.
The building originally opened in 1938 and was formerly named for UVA’s first president, Edwin A. Alderman. “As the University recently completed an extensive major project to create a modern, state-of-the art main library through completely renovating the historic portion of the facility ... it is presented with an opportunity to recognize another past president,” the BOV’s Building and Grounds Committee wrote in its agenda for the library’s renaming.
Edgar Shannon: UVA’s fourth president
Edgar Finley Shannon, Jr. was born in Lexington, Virginia, in 1918. Before leading UVA from 1959 to 1974, he served in the U.S. Navy as a junior gunnery officer during World War II and was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University where he received a Ph.D. in 1949. As UVA’s fourth president, he oversaw the institution during times of major political and social upheaval. Under his leadership, UVA instituted coeducation and racial integration. During that time, enrollment rose from 5,000 students to 15,000 as UVA, under a strategic plan Shannon developed, grew to become a nationally recognized research university.
According to the New York Times, Shannon is perhaps best known for his “dramatic stance” against the Vietnam War during his UVA presidency:
In 1970, after the United States drive into Cambodia and the shooting of student protesters at Kent State University by National Guardsmen, unrest mounted on the Virginia campus. Students boycotted classes, occupied the Reserve Officers Training Corps building, set fires and blocked traffic. …
Addressing 4,000 protesters gathered on the central lawn of the university, Mr. Shannon was at first jeered but soon won the crowd’s attention as he spoke of sharing their anguish over the killings at Kent State and of his passionate opposition to the war. Then, after leading the students and faculty in signing telegrams to Virginia’s two senators pressing them to stop the fighting in Southeast Asia, he was cheered.
Later, Mr. Shannon was denounced by some university alumni and a few newspapers in the area called for his dismissal. But the university’s governing board supported him, noting that he had kept the university open and free of violence when many other colleges and universities were forced to send students home.
At the commencement exercises that year, Mr. Shannon received a standing ovation as he rose to speak.
Those interested in Shannon’s leadership and legacy can find records of his administration in the Small Special Collections Library, which holds more than 100 boxes of his official papers. Other collections provide insight into the contributions of student activists in moving the University towards progress — particularly the May Strike of 1970 in reaction to Kent State and the escalation of the Vietnam War, and also the significant advocacy of the Black Student Alliance for integration, equity, and support in the 1960-70s. Plan a visit to Special Collections here. Or read more about Shannon in UVA Today.
Grand Opening celebration will be in April
The library reopened to the public on January 8, 2024. The renovation brought the building up to current standards of safety, accessibility, and service and features beautiful, naturally lit study and research spaces. Books and materials will continue to be moved into the space throughout the spring semester. A grand opening celebration will be held in the Shannon Library on April 4, 2024; details about that event are forthcoming.
“Stolen books,” bad faith, and fair use
It’s Fair Use Week! UVA Library’s Director of Information Policy, Brandon Butler, penned a piece for Harvard’s Fair Use Week series titled, “‘Stolen Books,’ Bad Faith, and Fair Use.” The piece examines the origins of AI training data and its intersections with court cases such as those around HathiTrust and Google Books. He writes:
Artificial intelligence is sure to be the hottest topic of this year’s Fair Use Week, and that hotness is well-deserved. It’s startling when a machine can instantly create written or visual works that would ordinarily require a skilled human writer or artist.
Fair use analysis is (famously) case-by-case, and the outcome of a fair use analysis for any particular AI technology will depend on how that technology works and (especially) the nature of its outputs and the purposes it serves. But we know from the Google Books and HathiTrust cases that some unlicensed computer processing of large datasets of in-copyright works is clearly fair use. Some AI technologies are sure to pass the fair use test from those cases, all else equal. But there is one interesting difference between HathiTrust and Google Books on one hand, and some of the AI tools being sued on the other: the books used in the former cases were lawfully owned by libraries and scanned with the libraries’ consent. It’s not clear that the AI companies have obtained all of their data with as clear a pedigree.
Indeed, one of the author class action lawsuits over AI argues that the datasets used to train some artificial intelligence tools are comprised partly or entirely of material of apparently dubious origin. As The Verge reports, the plaintiffs claim that some of the AI training data “were acquired from ‘shadow library’ websites like Bibliotik, Library Genesis, Z-Library, and others, noting the books are ‘available in bulk via torrent systems.’” Does this matter for the fair use calculus? Should it?
Read the full article from Harvard’s Fair Use Week blog.
For more Fair Use Week content, like “Fair Use Week 2024: The Taper’s Greatest Fair Use Hits, and a Taper Swan Song,” visit The Taper.
From eclipse prep to Pi Day: Here are 5 upcoming events at UVA Library
The University of Virginia Library has nearly five million print books available for checkout, five million e-books, myriad cozy study spaces, and a slew of teaching librarians to help you in the classroom or with research. And did you know we also offer events ranging from workshops to musical events for UVA and the Charlottesville community throughout the year?
Below, check out five upcoming events for those who love reading, crafting, eclipses, and more. All Library events are free.
1. “DIVERSIFY IT!” Reading Challenge
Inspired by the Pizza Hut BOOK IT! reading challenge in elementary schools, we’re hosting a higher education remix to encourage UVA students, faculty, and staff to read diverse stories. Each month we’ll be hosting themed pop-up libraries within the School of Education and Human Development that include children’s, young adult, and adult books. For February we are celebrating Black authors! Everyone who checks out a book from our February pop-up library will receive a “Free People Read Freely” bookmark.
Each month you will get a stamp on your “DIVERSIFY IT!” challenge card if you check out a book. At the end of the semester, if you have checked out at least one book each month from our pop-up libraries, you'll receive a special prize and we’ll celebrate with a pizza party!
- When: Tuesday, Feb. 27; 12 – 3 p.m.
- Where: Ridley Hall Lobby
2. Prepare for the April 8th Total Solar Eclipse!
On April 8th there will be a total eclipse of the sun visible from the United States, the last one until 2045. If you viewed the last U.S. total solar eclipse in August 2017, the April 8th eclipse will appear markedly different at totality because the sun is in a period of much greater activity. In addition, this eclipse will last longer, and will cover a wider path, as well as covering a more populated swath of the US.
To help you prepare for the eclipse, Professor Edward Murphy from UVA’s Department of Astronomy will give a lecture and demonstrate safe solar observing on Tuesday, February 27. During the program, we will discuss what to expect during the eclipse, where to go see the eclipse if you can travel to it, and how to safely observe the eclipse. (This event is part of the “STEM for Everyone” lecture series.)
- When: Tuesday, Feb. 27; 6 – 7 p.m.
- Where: Alderman Library, Room 330
- Registration is required: Register to Prepare for the Eclipse
3. Alderman Library Re-Orientation
We’re back and better than ever! Join Education and Social Science Research Librarian, Ashley Hosbach-Wallman, for a tour of the new spaces in Alderman Library. This tour will cover the history of library design at UVA and all of the new study spaces and services open to students (both undergraduate and graduate). We'll meet in the main lobby to get started.
This tour is a joint initiative between the UVA Library and the School of Education and Human Development’s student affairs office.
- When: Wednesday, Feb. 28; 1 – 2 p.m.
- Where: Alderman Library, main lobby/Memorial Hall
- Registration is required: Register for Alderman Re-Orientation
4. Pi Day Maker Craft
Make a Pi Day craft to celebrate the best holiday a-round!
Register to secure your spot, or drop in to the Scholars’ Lab Makerspace anytime between 11 a.m. and 5 p.m. on Thursday, March 14, to make a craft. And dig in to some FREE pie while supplies last!
The Scholars’ Lab Makerspace is located in Alderman Library on the third floor (308i). See here for Makerspace hours and a map.
- When: Thursday, March. 14; 11a.m. – 5 p.m.
- Where: The Makerspace (Alderman 308i)
- Registration is required: Register for the Pi Day Maker Craft
5. AI Tools Beyond ChatGPT
ChatGPT exploded on the scene and has been the focus of much of the conversation around AI and AI tools. But there are a host of others that offer similar functions but are trained on different corpuses and many tools that offer different functionalities. In this workshop, we’ll cover a variety of AI tools including Bard, Claude, Copilot, and more.
If you’re curious about AI tools and would like to learn more, this workshop will offer an introduction and opportunity to explore these tools yourself. There will also be opportunity for discussion and sharing, so if you have an AI tool that you use and find helpful, we’ll be asking for suggestions and demos from attendees as well.
- When: Thursday, March. 14; 3 – 4 p.m.
- Where: Online
- Registration is required: Register for AI Tools Beyond ChatGPT
Updates from Alderman: Books in stacks, a new cafe, and more
Good news for bibliophiles: the books in Alderman Library’s fifth-floor stacks are now fully moved in and available to patrons! Browse the shelves to your heart’s content and, when ready, take your selected books to a circulation desk on the second or fourth floors for checkout. (Throughout the renovation, these books were available in Clemons or “by request” through Virgo.)
Each floor in the main library (aside from the basement and second floor, which do not have stacks) has two stacks locations — Stacks West and Stacks East. The fifth floor stacks books now available are in the Library of Congress Classification subclasses PS–Z, including American literature, German literature, Dutch literature, Scandinavian literature, fiction and juvenile belles lettres, bibliography, library science, and information resources.
The book-move-back process in Alderman Library will continue for several months, moving down floor-by-floor (the fourth-floor stacks will be completed next, likely by early March). When book movers are working on a floor, books on that floor will remain “by request” in Virgo and can be requested for delivery. When the movers complete a floor, the items will change to their new, permanent stacks location and become available for on-site checkout. To follow along with the progress of the book move, bookmark our status dashboard.
New cafe open for business
Another exciting update from inside the newly renovated building: the entirely student-run Saxbys is now open on the second floor of Alderman. Serving coffee, smoothies, breakfast all day, and an impressive array of grilled cheese sandwiches, Saxbys is open weekdays and Sundays. Students and staff packed the café during its opening day in Alderman earlier this month, observing a ribbon-cutting ceremony, picking up free swag, high-fiving Cav-Man, and sampling the menu.
In the news
UVA students have spoken, and Alderman is “the new place to be on Grounds,” according to the Cavalier Daily. Reporter Mia Tan interviewed multiple students in late January about their experience using the library since the start of the semester and the reviews in the article were uniformly positive. They remarked on the “open and spacious” feel of the renovated building and how its welcoming atmosphere is conducive to studying.
For now, students cite one another as the primary forces that shape the character of Alderman. From establishing the ‘talking floors’ to finding favorite study spots, [Fourth-year Engineering student Morgan] Small anticipates that students will fall into patterns as they frequent the library.
“I think that students will fill each space in a unique way, and this is something that will naturally occur over time,” Small said. “[Alderman] seems like it’s meant to be form-fitting to whoever is studying here.”
Another Cavalier Daily reporter, Emily Barrie, “explored every inch” of the main library earlier this month to find her top ten study spots. It may come as no surprise that the McGregor Room was listed as number one, but Barrie introduces readers to some new spots that she charmingly nicknamed, including the “Puzzle Place” and “Medieval Lights Area” (also known as the North Reading Room), both located on the fourth floor.
We’re thrilled that students are feeling so comfortable in the renovated library and hope you, whether you are a student, faculty member, staff, or community patron, come find your favorite reading spot soon.
Rich data illuminates stories of Charlottesville and beyond
It’s Love Data Week! This year’s theme is “My Kind of Data,” and we have a guest post from Laura Hjerpe, Senior Research Data Management Librarian.
In recognition of Love Data Week 2024, I’m featuring Charlottesville data stories from the University of Virginia Equity Center and local data from the City of Charlottesville, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and the U.S. Government. I chose this because my kind of data is a data story with human interest, backed up by reliable data sources.
Data stories from the Equity Center
Health outcomes in the Charlottesville region, one of three Picturing Climate Justice data stories from the Equity Center, begins with a discussion about how environmental factors connected with climate change can affect physical and mental health, especially that of African Americans. Eight visualizations show the relationships between socioeconomic characteristics, such as income, racial demographics, age, and location with health outcomes such as asthma, diabetes, and poor physical health. Every visualization is accompanied by variable definitions, data sources, and Python code used to create the visualizations. Additionally, a new piece on Charlottesville Urban Heat Islands has been added that updates prior climate equity work. You may find this report and others on the Charlottesville Regional Equity Atlas by scrolling down and clicking “See all Reports.”
The Charlottesville Regional Climate Equity Atlas can be used to explore social, infrastructure, and climate measures. To use, select any two measures to see the relationship between the measures in census tracts across the greater Charlottesville region. Researchers may narrow visualizations to specific counties or to the city of Charlottesville and choose from eight categories of variables: Demographic and Social, Health, Youth and Education, Jobs and Income, Housing and Transportation, Risk Factors, Community Assets and Infrastructure, and Climate Measures. After selecting a measure, the system shows that measure’s definition and data source.
These resources not only amplify data about Charlottesville area residents, but they also walk the reader through the data to make it easier to understand.
Local data collections
Charlottesville has a number of local data collections. First, Charlottesville Open Data has municipality-generated data, such as Real Estate (Commercial Details) and a Tree Inventory. It features Charlottesville maps with city operations, historical preservation, and Green City data.
Equity and Open Data features local historical data, as well as stories such as Union Ridge Today, a story told with maps about the transition of a neighborhood from Black-owned farmland to a busy Charlottesville suburb. There is overlap of datasets with Charlottesville Open Data, since both sites focus on local data.
Virginia Open Data Portal contains Commonwealth-wide data. Popular topics include COVID-19, policing, food, and civil suit judgements. One popular historical dataset is called Freedom Suits which contains petitions initiated by enslaved people seeking to gain their freedom. Details extracted from these petitions include names, ages, years, claims, and judgements. The full text digital documents may be retrieved by file name from Virginia Untold: The African American Narrative. This collection, from the Library of Virginia, provides access to digital records documenting lived experiences of enslaved and free Black and multiracial people.
Local data from the U.S. government
The 2015-2019 American Community Survey (ACS) 5-Year Estimates found in Social Explorer are produced by the federal government and contain local data from communities throughout the United States, including the Charlottesville area. The 2015-2019 ACS 5-Year Estimates is a nationwide survey that asks about topics such as education, employment, internet access, transportation. The 5-year estimates represent data collected over 60 months and provide multiyear estimates for geographic areas with fewer than 65,000 residents. For more information about the ACS survey, see Understanding and Using American Community Survey Data: What All Data Users Need to Know.
CDC Places, a collaboration between the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, reports county, place, census tract, and Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTA) data and uses small area estimation methods to obtain 36 chronic disease measures.
Ready to find your own data? Visit our Data and Statistics LibGuide for search strategy tips and to find data archives, data on a topic, and more.
Visualization training
Do you want to get started with visualizing your own data? Check out our RDS workshops. If you can’t make a session, reach out to the instructor for a one-on-one consultation.
Do you want to enhance your story with maps? Visit Scholar’s Lab GIS Workshops. Coming up soon, Web Mapping and Visualization and Spatial Analysis with ArcGIS Online are offered during the last two weeks in February. Both workshops are one hour and assume no previous experience using GIS.
There are lots of ways we can help — visit our Research Data Services site to learn about what we can offer. If you need help with finding data or using visualization tools, analyzing the data you already have, or managing your data, reach out to researchdataservices@virginia.edu.
.
Trio of exhibitions examines Black life 100 years ago, with a focus on Central Virginia
On a warm day last June, visitors flocked to the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library for a “Family Day” event in celebration of the library’s blockbuster exhibition, “Visions of Progress: Portraits of Dignity, Style, and Racial Uplift,” curated by UVA Associate Professor of History John Edwin Mason. Since its installation in September 2022, the exhibition, which showcased portraits that African Americans in Central Virginia commissioned from the Holsinger Studio in the early 20th century, had drawn national media attention and attracted more than 10,000 visitors, nearly double the average amount. On this day in June 2023, families came to say goodbye to the exhibition just before it closed, and to have their own portraits taken as well.
Inside the Main Gallery of the Harrison Institute and Small Special Collections Library, modern-day Charlottesville residents found Holsinger portraits of their ancestors. Outside, families posed among the lush greenery for tintype portraits taken by Richmond photographer Em White, who was hired by Special Collections for the event. Nearby, visitors climbed inside the Free Book Bus to peruse titles, while on the first floor of the Harrison/Small building, children and teens participated in a “Zine Jam” workshop, cutting and pasting images to create their own tiny magazines.
“We had always wanted to do an event like Family Day for the local community,” said Holly Robertson, Curator of University Library Exhibitions, who organized the event and co-curated the Holsinger exhibition. “But it’s one thing to want to do an event, it's another thing to actually pull it off. ‘Visions of Progress’ had such good momentum, from the opening night to the media high of being featured on PBS News Hour in the dead of winter, and it really kept people coming to the exhibition, interested in the exhibition, writing in to say, ‘Hey, my relative is in here!’ It was an incredible, constant wave of positivity that propelled us to do a ‘last hurrah’ of sorts with Family Day.”
The success of “Visions of Progress” also inspired the curatorial team to continue examining Black life in the United States 100 years ago. “In thinking about other things that we wanted to highlight, both from a curatorial interest from staff and faculty, as well as a timely interest … we realized the Harlem Renaissance was what we wanted to do next,” Robertson said. As “Visions of Progress” wound down, Robertson worked with Special Collections curators Krystal Appiah and George Riser to dive into the Library’s rich collection of Harlem Renaissance artifacts, including books, magazines, illustrations, and manuscripts of the writers, artists, and thinkers of that era.
Looking back at the Harlem Renaissance
In September, 2023, UVA Library launched its latest major exhibition, “Their World As Big As They Made It: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance” in the Main Gallery of the Special Collections Library with an opening-night reception that featured live music from the Charlottesville Jazz Congregation. The curators had interpreted the cultural zeitgeist correctly; attendance for the event was at capacity, and just before the opening, the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced plans for its own Harlem Renaissance exhibition (launching later this month).
The exhibition’s title is inspired by the Georgia Douglas Johnson poem, “Your World,” in which she looks back at the creativity of the Harlem Renaissance, acknowledges the hardships of being an emerging artist, and beckons a new generation of Black artists, writers, poets, and publishers with the line: “Your world is as big as you make it.” Johnson published her first poems in 1916 in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s magazine The Crisis, which is featured prominently in the exhibition.
“Our original idea for the exhibition was to take the three major magazines from Harlem from the period: Opportunity, The Messenger, and The Crisis, which all had different approaches to what they called ‘Negro uplift’ during the Great Migration, amid a background of incredible violence that was being perpetrated at that time,” said Riser, one of the exhibition’s curators. The works in the exhibition show “the countering of that violence, through this renaissance of art and poetry and music,” he said.
In addition to the original editions of those magazines, the exhibition features the papers of Langston Hughes; first editions of books by Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston, and Countee Cullen; as well as fashions and music from the era, thanks to contributions from Sophie Abramowitz, a specialist at Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (and former student assistant for Special Collections) whose graduate dissertation focused on songwriting in the Harlem Renaissance. Marlon Ross, a UVA English professor, also assisted with curation. Many of the items in the exhibition were originally collected by UVA Library soon after they were published. “Not many institutions have a [Harlem Renaissance] collection like ours,” curator Krystal Appiah told UVA Today. [See below for the curators’ favorite elements of the exhibition.]
Inspired by the way “Visions of Progress” drew in the local community through ancestral connections, Library curators put out a call this past summer for present-day artists to create works that would explore or respond to poems by Harlem Renaissance authors. The project, titled “As Big as We Make It!” was sponsored by a grant from the UVA Arts Council. A selection committee chose five contemporary artists with connections to UVA and Charlottesville to showcase their work in the exhibition. Read more about them here.
Curators provided tours of “Their World As Big As They Made It” to more than 600 middle school students on field trips just in the first three months of the exhibition run — and they will welcome almost 1,000 more Charlottesville-area high school students before the end of this month. In late January, more than 1,000 people registered to attend a virtual behind-the-scenes tour of the exhibition through UVA Lifetime Learning. On April 26, the Library will hold an open-house Final Friday celebration of the Harlem Renaissance. And for those traveling to Charlottesville for the 2024 Black Alumni Weekend or either Reunions weekends, the Library will offer in-person curator-led tours of the exhibition.
Sneak Peak: Curators share their favorite elements of “Their World As Big As They Made It: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance”
Looking ahead: The world of Anne Spencer
As Robertson was working on building on the Harlem Renaissance exhibition, she realized the Library had an opportunity to continue to examine Black life a century ago through the lens of poet Anne Spencer, a Virginia native who was an active figure in the Harlem Renaissance. UVA Library holds a vast collection of Spencer’s work and papers and this will be the subject of the next major exhibition opening in the Main Gallery of the Special Collections Library in September 2024. “I see ‘Visions of Progress,’ the Harlem Renaissance, and Anne Spencer as a triptych of exhibitions that look back at the African American experience 100 years ago, with a focus on Charlottesville and Central Virginia,” Robertson said.
Spencer lived most of her life in Lynchburg, Virginia, but had a strong presence in the literary world of the Harlem Renaissance. Her first published poem appeared in The Crisis and subsequent work was published in “The New Negro: An Interpretation,” a 1925 anthology of fiction, essays, and poetry edited by Alain Locke that served as a central text of the Harlem Renaissance, pushing for social and political change. In addition to being a poet, Spencer was a teacher, librarian, mother, gardener, and activist who helped revitalize the Lynchburg chapter of the NAACP, and her Lynchburg home was a meeting place for writers and intellectuals including Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, and W. E. B. DuBois.
Spencer’s house is now a museum, maintained and run in part by her granddaughter, Shaun Spencer-Hester. “I just traveled to the museum recently and it is so beautiful,” Robertson said. “It is a liberated woman’s space, complete with a writer’s studio and gorgeous garden. The museum is starting to get its own national attention and funding. It feels like the right time to recognize the Library’s Spencer collection, which scholars are publishing on these days — and to lift up and celebrate the work of Shaun Spencer Hester as well.”
Robertson hopes to build the exhibition space to allude to architectural elements of the Spencer house and garden. “I keep thinking about family trees and the beautiful garden that [Spencer] left,” she said. “I plan to situate exhibition cases like trees, like the arbors that you see in the garden, giving people a sense of the beauty that they can behold and the story that they can behold about this incredible civil rights activist, librarian, and poet who brought the Harlem Renaissance into her own home.”
To see our latest major exhibition, “Their World As Big As They Made It: Looking Back at the Harlem Renaissance,” in person, visit the Main Gallery of the Special Collections Library, open weekdays and Saturday afternoons. Or attend our Final Friday event on April 26, 2024, for an open house-style celebration featuring gallery talks by exhibition curators.
Browse by category
Browse by date
- November 2018 (1)
- August 2019 (1)
- November 2019 (1)
- January 2020 (1)
- November 2020 (1)
- January 2021 (1)
- September 2021 (2)
- October 2021 (1)
- November 2021 (1)
- January 2022 (4)
- February 2022 (2)
- March 2022 (2)
- April 2022 (1)
- May 2022 (3)
- August 2022 (1)
- September 2022 (2)
- November 2022 (4)
- December 2022 (3)
- January 2023 (6)
- February 2023 (9)
- March 2023 (11)
- April 2023 (6)
- May 2023 (4)
- June 2023 (3)
- July 2023 (1)
- August 2023 (3)
- September 2023 (5)
- October 2023 (7)
- November 2023 (3)
- December 2023 (5)
- January 2024 (4)
- February 2024 (8)
- March 2024 (2)
- April 2024 (6)
- May 2024 (4)
- June 2024 (1)