The University serves Virginia, the nation, and the world by preparing responsible citizen-leaders; advancing, preserving, and disseminating knowledge; and providing world-class patient care.
All gifts of any kind help secure the University’s place as a premier institution of learning and make it possible for our students, faculty, and researchers to shape a brighter.
You can give to all 12 schools across Grounds. The possibilities are endless for supporting our students, faculty, and programs. Together, we will find the way forward.
You can join the growing number of alumni and friends who invest now in the University’s future by including UVA as a beneficiary of their wills, charitable trusts, and retirement plans. Gifts like these can offer you and your family significant tax benefits as well as greater financial flexibility in meeting your personal and philanthropic goals.
Through Honor the Future, the Campaign for the University of Virginia, we are building on our strong foundations to support the president’s vision: to become the best public university by 2030 and one of the very best in the world.
Today, the Library’s original purpose remains unchanged: to provide access to accumulated knowledge and to advance scholarship and research by collecting, preserving, organizing, and sharing materials of all kinds.
With your help we’ve raised
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Generous support from leadership-level gifts to donations of rare materials helped strengthen every aspect of the Library’s mission.
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Over the course of the Honor the Future campaign, the UVA Library raised more than $95 million from over 5,300 donors, surpassing previous Library campaigns. Gifts supported every aspect of the Library’s mission, helping to strengthen learning and research, support faculty scholarship, further innovation and collaboration, and enhance Library collections and physical spaces.
Gifts to increase access and affordability helped efforts to remove barriers to use of Library services and resources and bolster initiatives to reduce the cost of performing research and producing scholarship at UVA. The opening of the Edgar Shannon Library marked a major success, with an extensive overhaul not only bringing the building up to current standards of safety, accessibility, and service, but creating a beautiful and sustainable new library to serve the University community and beyond as UVA enters its third century.
The rich history of the support of alumni and friends in building collections continued throughout the campaign. Unrestricted gifts to collections helped to broaden holdings across fields and disciplines and preserve and make available materials for research and scholarship. In addition, the Library’s Special Collections saw more than $30 million in donations of significant collections of rare materials from private donors.
All campaign committee members were extremely generous with their time, their networks, their experience, and their own gifts. Campaign co-chairs Marjorie Harrison, daughter Marjorie Webb Childress (Col ’01, Darden ’09), and the Harrison Family Foundation made leadership-level gifts to sponsor the building’s twin study courts at the heart of the new Shannon Library—now known as “The Marjories.”
Supporting Student Employees
“I get to dig into research topics I had never thought about before, working with rare manuscripts and learning every day.”
Sophia Dexter (Col ’25)
The UVA Library is one of the largest employers of students at the University, routinely engaging more than 300 student workers each academic year. Students work in every library space, assisting visitors at service and information desks, helping with events and exhibitions, digitizing materials, aiding with technology needs, and much, much more.
Student workers have always help make the Library run (the first University Librarian was a student) and many of them are supported through philanthropy.
One such student is Sophia Dexter, a 2025 graduate with degrees in History and Archaeology, who worked in the Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library for the past three years with support from the Wolfe Undergraduate Fellowship Program, funded by former Library student assistant Mary Lacey Long Wolfe (Col ’88). Dexter pulls and shelves materials, answers reference questions, and fields research requests.
Special Collections has a long history of employing students, including former UVA president John T. Casteen III, who wrote that he experienced “a special, wonderful kind of education” as a student worker in the manuscripts division, a sentiment Dexter agrees with.
“I love it!” she said. “I’ve pulled everything from 16th-century medical treatises to the papers of Edward Stettinius, who was Secretary of State during World War II. I get to dig into research topics I had never thought about before, working with rare manuscripts and learning every day.”
The Edgar Shannon Library
The renamed and refurbished building will serve the UVA community for generations.
The renovation of Alderman Library, now renamed to honor UVA’s fourth president, Edgar F. Shannon, was one of the University’s most visible capital projects of recent years and a major campaign priority for the Library.
The project was completely funded by private donations and state appropriations—no tuition dollars were used. Campaign co-chairs Marjorie Harrison and daughter Marjorie Webb Childress (Col ’01, Darden ’09), and the Harrison Family Foundation made leadership-level gifts to sponsor the building’s Study Courts. In all, thousands of donors supported the renovation and those who gave $1000 or more (nearly 500) are honored on a donor wall created from repurposed card catalogs.
The renovation refurbished the building’s historic envelope, created five new floors of mixed-use space as well as a new basement, and added all new HVAC, electricity, fire suppression, plumbing, technology, and other infrastructure. The result is a welcoming, comfortable, and light-filled 230,000 square foot building featuring improved accessibility, a LEED gold certification for sustainability, and a much better and safer environment for both the people using the building and the collections housed within.
The Edgar Shannon Library will serve for generations as the main library for the University of Virginia.
Art in Library Spaces
Bringing art into public spaces brings a sense of community to the UVA Library.
Art in Library Spaces (AiLS) is an initiative designed to create inclusive aesthetic spaces for the University and Charlottesville communities and strengthen the UVA Library’s presence as a place of belonging for all. AiLs is a collaborative venture, steered by a committee made up of Library staff and members of the arts community at UVA and in the surrounding areas. Partnerships in place or planned include projects with UVA Athletics, UVA Arts, Boys and Girls Club of Central Virginia, the School of Architecture, New City Arts Initiative, and others.
These partnerships will bring art into all the buildings in the UVA Library system, and AiLS also sponsors a fellowship program supporting a practicing artist local to Central Virginia. Poet and artist MaKshya Tolbert is the inaugural artist in residence.
The initiative is supported through the Aric Lasher Art Fund, created with an initial gift from former University Librarian and Dean of Libraries John M. Unsworth and his wife Maggie. The fund honors the late artist and architect Aric Lasher, whose last built project was the Edgar Shannon Library.
The University’s Library renovation promises a new environment for enlightening UVA students.
The University of Virginia Library announced a $2 million commitment from Marjorie Harrison Webb that will provide unrestricted support...
A major gift from a noted book collector will allow the Iselin Collection of Humor to reside in the...
What would a university be without a library?
