News

As the University of Georgia marks the 100^th anniversary of its first swim and dive, the rich history of the program will be celebrated in a new exhibit on display at the UGA Special Collections Libraries. 

The exhibit “Sustained Excellence: A History of UGA Swim & Dive” explores the program’s decades of dominance in the pool and in the classroom. Viewers will see rarely displayed photographs and artifacts from the UGA Athletic Association archive and the personal collection of retired coach Jack Bauerle.

From UGA Today. 

The University of Georgia is reimagining learning spaces by combining resources that allow students to experiment with their ideas and bring them to life with new technologies. In the new Creative Engagement Wing at the Miller Learning Center, students can record a podcast, embroider a tapestry, 3D print a medical device prototype or rehearse a presentation using a virtual reality headset.

University of Georgia students, faculty, and staff now have expanded opportunities to stay up to date on Georgia news for free, thanks to a UGA Libraries-funded online subscription to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The online subscription, which is provided at no cost for those with a UGA email address, adds to the UGA Libraries’ offerings of digital news content, which also includes The New York Times and The Athletic, Wall Street Journal, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Graduate students studying invasive insects and declining songbird species have been awarded Wormsloe Fellowships, hosted by the University of Georgia Libraries’ Center for Research and Education at Wormsloe (CREW).

For UGA Libraries, Thomas May’s job centers around film and audiovisual work, but the archivist also enjoys the printed word. In fact, he was named one of the best authors in the state, as a recipient of a 2025 Georgia Author of the Year Award in the science fiction/fantasy category.

May serves as the audiovisual systems archivist and access coordinator with the Brown Media Archives and Peabody Awards Collection, one of three special collections units at the University of Georgia Libraries. He’s also a novelist, who self-published his debut fantasy novel Alan Dreams of Giants in November.

University of Georgia faculty and graduate students have more than double the opportunities for open access publishing, thanks to new UGA Libraries read and publish agreements with Elsevier and Springer Nature, two of the largest academic journal publishers.

Books about racial inequality in U.S. higher education are the 2025 recipients of the Lillian Smith Book Awards, administered by the University of Georgia Libraries to honor books dedicated to social justice issues.  

Three decades after the original photography exhibit toured the South, David Zeiger’s Displaced in the New South is on display at the University of Georgia Special Collections Libraries. 

The exhibit traces the stories of Asian and Hispanic immigrant communities in Metro Atlanta in the mid-1990s, featuring quotes from individuals featured in Zeiger’s documentary of the same name. Through black-and-white photographs, negatives, and other artifacts, the exhibit documents the region’s shifting demographics and emerging communities through the experiences of immigrant families.  

Even before three books arrived on shelves this year, UGA librarians were a part of the production. Three faculty members have been credited as author or editor in books published in 2025.

“Librarians do the essential work of acquiring, preserving, and sharing knowledge,” said university librarian Toby Graham, “but our librarians also are university faculty who contribute new scholarship, themselves, as we see from the recent publications by Ruta Abolins, Melody Rood, and Sara Wright.” 

Most recently, Abolins added a chapter to the UGA Press book The Archivability of Television: Essays on Preservation and Perseverance. Edited by Lauren Bratslavsky and Elizabeth Peterson, the book was published June 1.