Spring 2021 Semester Newsletter

Welcome to the Spring 2021 edition of the Library Update newsletter!

See highlights from the University Libraries' busy semester, including:

• President’s Listening and Learning Tour
• Art + Feminism Wikipedia Edit-a-thon
• Fair Use Week
• Stress Less @ Your Libraries
• and more

The University Libraries were pleased to introduce the inaugural cohort of Library Ambassadors for the Spring 2021 semester. 
 

The Minority Health Disparities Engaged Research (MHD-ER) Team has librarians embedded within the ongoing project, and the University Libraries’ resources and services have been key to the ongoing efforts of this team. 

Meet the librarian who brought the Libraries directly to living rooms or kitchen tables or wherever students worked from home. 

A second consecutive postponement was never on the table, so the Dean’s Office went to work on producing a virtual ceremony to celebrate our faculty and staff. The event took place on Wednesday, May 5 over Zoom. 

I was very excited when I found out that I was selected to join the University Libraries for the Anna Radkowski-Lee Graduate Assistantship. As I contributed to the Libraries’ outreach and marketing efforts throughout the 2020-2021 academic year, I learned more about the services that the Libraries offered and shared these with my peers.

Have you ever wondered what websites you frequent may have looked like when they were first created? Thanks to web-archiving technologies such as Archive-It and the Wayback Machine, this is a current reality. As the Anna Radkowski-Lee Graduate Assistant for Web Archives for the 2020-2021 academic year, I am excited to have the opportunity to spend time in the M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives, learning about and working with these incredible, yet complex, technologies. 

Following 24 years of service to the University Libraries, Mary Van Ullen retired on March 31, 2021. Before leaving, Mary took some time to sit down and answer a few questions for the Library Update newsletter. 

The M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections and Archives is proud to receive a $63,890 grant to support the project, Mailbag: A Stable Package for Email in Multiple Formats. The grant is funded through the University of Illinois program, Email Archives: Building Capacity and Community.

The M.E. Grenander Department of Special Collections & Archives and The Alice Hastings Murphy Preservation Department are collaborating to digitize more than a thousand hours of historic audio on magnetic tape. 

Here's what our faculty and staff published and presented during the Spring 2021 semester.

Elaine Lasda was promoted to the rank of full librarian.