News

The Georgia Historical Society has announced that Mr. Donald S. Summerlin, the Digital Projects Librarian and Archivist at the Digital Library of Georgia at the University of Georgia Libraries, has been named the recipient of the 2020 John C. Inscoe Award for his article, “‘We Represented the Best of Georgia in Chicago’: The Georgia Loyalist Delegate Challenge at the 1968 Democratic Convention.”

“We are pleased to recognize Donald Summerlin as the recipient of this year’s Inscoe Award for the best article in the Georgia Historical Quarterly for the year 2019,” said Dr. W. Todd Groce, President and CEO of the Georgia Historical Society. “His meticulous research sheds light on the controversial 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago and Georgia’s role in it, during one of the most turbulent years in American history.”

Students and faculty in the University of Georgia community can continue to take advantage of library services after the Thanksgiving transition to online classes, whether in Athens or at home in another state.

In addition to online resources and virtual consultations with librarians and archivists, library facilities, including the Miller Learning Center, will remain available to students, faculty, staff, and the community through the remainder of the year and into the spring semester.

One of the nation’s leading experts on food safety and nutrition will present a virtual lecture at the University of Georgia as the inaugural Food, Power, and Politics Lecture, hosted by the Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, a unit of the UGA Libraries.

Terry Kay has had a lot of ideas in his life, and most of those developed into page-turning novels. But in the summer of 1999, one of his ideas wasn’t about creating books — it was about honoring the authors that came before him.

“I thought Georgia needed to be doing more to honor its writers, to honor its rich literary heritage,” said Kay, whose seventh novel was published that year. “Around the same time, I began to be aware that Georgia literature wasn’t being taught in the schools anymore and I thought that establishing an award that focused not just a particular work by a writer but their whole lifetime of work was a good way to honor the remarkable writers who hail from Georgia or who have made Georgia their home and might encourage teachers of English to see what incredible writers we have right here in Georgia.”

The University of Georgia and University of Florida might be rivals on the football field, but they are partners in providing public access to government information.

UGA Libraries and the George A. Smathers Libraries at the University of Florida have been designated as a shared regional depository library by the U.S. Government Publishing Office, a move that modernizes efforts to provide access to government reports by allowing libraries to tailor their resources to meet their patrons needs while collaborating to maintain access to comprehensive collections.

A changing political landscape, an embattled incumbent, a charged Senate battle in the state and a race for support in the suburbs: these are the circumstances that defined the 1980 elections in Georgia.  Just one day before Election Day 2020 among similar circumstances, archivists with the University of Georgia’s Russell Library for Political Research and Studies will trace the history of the election 40 years ago that marked a dramatic moment for both the state and the nation.

The University of Georgia Libraries and the Center for Teaching and Learning invite full-time UGA faculty from all disciplines to apply to participate in the 2021 Special Collections Libraries Faculty Teaching Fellows program.

Now in its sixth year, the program brings together a select group of UGA faculty to explore archives-based learning as a high-impact learning practice through intensive workshops with specialists from the University’s three special collections units and representatives from the Center for Teaching and Learning.

The Digital Humanities Lab will host a series of virtual workshops to introduce a number of methods for visualizing data and will introduce the concepts using web tools, Excel, Tableau, and R.

These sessions are open to undergraduate and graduate students in any discipline and are intended for beginners. No experience necessary. Sessions will be held on Wednesdays at 4 via Zoom. To register, contact digi@uga.edu.

Oct. 28th:     Intro to data visualization resources at UGA and beyond

Nov. 4th:      Bar graphs and histograms in Excel, Tableau, and R

Nov. 11th:     Scatterplots in Excel, Tableau, and R

Nov. 18th:    Area graphs in Excel, Tableau and R

A new tool on the UGA libraries’ website helps people retrieve books while social distancing.

The Stackmaps tool has been integrated into the GIL Find system on the Libraries’ website, libs.uga.edu. For books available at the Main and Science libraries for checkout, patrons can click “map it” and find a guide that helps them navigate the library stacks to the location of the materials they need.

“With 4.6 million volumes in our libraries, organized via the Library of Congress call numbers system, we know that it can be difficult to find the book that you want among our stacks. This tool helps patrons to find what they are looking for by themselves, which helps all of us maintain social distancing,” Viki Timian, head of access services for UGA Libraries, said of the tool, which launched just prior to the campus closure last spring.

The UGA Libraries’ "Election 2020" guide provides a one-stop shop for information about the upcoming elections. The guide leads you to reliable sources for election news and fact checking; polling and campaign finance data; in-depth research projects; and dates for voting and debates.