General Library News

The UGA Libraries is hosting a spring series of Graduate Research Workshops designed to help graduate students succeed at UGA and beyond.

 Topics include: 

Author Colleen Oakley will return to her alma mater to read from her latest novel.

The book event will be held at 3:30 p.m. on Thursday, Jan. 23 at the University of Georgia’s Miller Learning Center. Sponsored by UGA’s Libraries, the event is free and open to the public, and a light reception will follow.

Oakley’s latest novel, You Were There Too, is one of O Magazine’s Top 22 Romance Books of 2020, a Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review and a Library Reads January 2020 pick. Oakley will read from the book and sign copies afterward.

With a librarian’s help, Isabell Ott’s research project grew exponentially into a complete history of an understudied group of viruses comprised of 300 sources of information. Jeri Sasser learned sophisticated methods for an extensive literature search that are key to her new adventures in graduate school, and Lauren Boyd discovered new sources and new ways of thinking critically that lead to summer field research in Baja Big Sur, Mexico.

These three students are just a few examples of the influence that the UGA Libraries Undergraduate Research Award has had on students in the past year.

Since 2007, the Libraries’ Undergraduate Research Award (LURA) has encouraged and

rewarded research excellence and growth as a scholar.

The exhibition hall in the University of Georgia’s Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries will be named in honor of CNN founder, environmentalist and longtime Atlantan Ted Turner, subject to UGA Cabinet approval, thanks in part to a $550,000 donation made by WarnerMedia (formerly Time Warner), an entertainment and media conglomerate that merged with Turner Broadcasting in 1996.

 GIL Express online requesting will not be available from December 16, 2019 through January 1, 2020. Service will resume on January 2, 2020.

Our lists of databases by subject, our alphabetical list of databases, and our subject guides are currently down. This is due to a nationwide technical issue at the host site. We hope they will be back up soon and apologize for the inconvenience.

In the meantime, search our databases at https://www.galileo.usg.edu/

University of Georgia students can now develop—and play—virtual reality from the comfort of their dorm rooms. Two Oculus Rift VR headsets and accompanying Alienware 15 R3 gaming laptops are now available for checkout from the Science Library Makerspace. Any UGA student may borrow the equipment for a 72-hour loan period. The gaming laptops are enabled for VR prototyping and exploration and loaded with Oculus Rift, Steam and Unity Game Engine software.

This equipment is on loan from Kyle Johnsen, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering.

“The systems will help students work on virtual reality projects anywhere, without requiring access to a specialized laboratory,” Johnsen said. “[They] are specifically designed to be self-contained, with all required software and hardware to get started.”

University of Georgia Libraries’ books will soon transcend shelves and be available online to students, faculty and members of the community in Athens and around the world.

Through a new partnership with Google, about 120,000 of the Libraries’ 4.5 million volumes will be digitized, allowing further access to literary, historic, scientific and reference books and journals through UGA’s library catalog as well as one of the largest digital book collections in the world.

“The University of Georgia Libraries’ collection of 4.5 million volumes is a vast resource for students and scholars at our campuses, and the Google Books partnership extends those benefits to people across the globe,” University Librarian and Associate Provost Toby Graham said. “The ability to search through the full text of these digitized materials will make it even easier for researchers to gain access to the knowledge that helps them to better understand our world.”

Pat Mitchell, a renowned journalist who broke barriers as the first female president of PBS and the first president of CNN Productions, will discuss her career at an event launching her new book, hosted by the University of Georgia Libraries.

For years, Anna Lee Robbins has enjoyed going to the Main Library at the University of Georgia to find a quiet place to study. But this year is different.

Thanks to new study rooms, Robbins and her classmate Alyssa Knowles set up their laptops nearly every day after class to go through their notes and work together toward their master’s in international policy.

“I’ve always been a big library person, but it’s a lot better now because we can collaborate,” said Robbins, who said she frequented the facility during her undergraduate studies as well. “It’s such an improvement over what it was, and I’m really appreciative.”

Finishing up her bagel from the Benson Collaboration Café, Knowles said the changes have made the Main Library a new favorite study venue for her. “We can discuss things, and it doesn’t bother anyone else,” she said. “It’s really open, and you can always find a place to focus.”