Photo courtesy of Kallie Stahl, Communication and Marketing Specialist.

Thank you to everyone who donated to the Hunger and Homelessness Awareness Week (HHAW) food drive. There’s still time to drop off non-perishable food items. Just look for the donation box on Falvey’s first floor (in front of the HHAW display).

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Memorial Library.

By Ethan Shea

Dugan Polk Family Reading Room in Falvey Memorial Library

On 1842 Day, the Villanova community comes together for a day of giving.

Over the past four years, 1842 Day has raised $21.4 million for the University, positively impacting the lives of students, staff, and faculty alike. There will be all sorts of fun events on campus, including “Cat Cab’s Trivia,” a Plinko-style game called “Oreo Dunk,” and live music.

In the midst of all this activity, everyone will have the chance to make a difference in their community by directing a donation to a cause of their choice. Whether you would like to support academics, athletics, or student life, 1842 Day has a cause for you!

In the interest of supporting the education of future Villanovans, I am asking you to consider designating your 1842 Day gift to Falvey Memorial Library.

The Library is perhaps the most essential part of any college campus and is the heart of all branches of academia. Over the course of the past year and a half, Falvey Library has adapted to a rapidly changing world by promoting and expanding online resources as well as contactless book pickup, which has shifted to Pick Up & Go. 1842 Day gifts to Falvey Library are critical to maintaining the University Archives and areas for students to study, such as the beautiful Dugan Polk Family Reading Room.

To donate, simply follow this link. Another way to donate to the library is through our home page. Just scroll to the bottom of the page, click the button that says “Support Our Library,” and follow the instructions.

Informational cards describing how to send gifts are available on the first floor of Falvey Library as well.

Ethan Shea is a first-year English Graduate Student at Villanova University and Graduate Assistant at Falvey Memorial Library.

Falvey Memorial Library inspires students to challenge their minds and hearts by accessing expansive print, digital, and archival resources and collaborating with expert subject librarians and staff.

That is why we are asking you to consider supporting the Library this Giving Tuesday.

Make a gift of $25 or more through this link and you will receive Villanova’s 2019 Christmas ornament as a thank you. Be sure to restrict your gift to Falvey through this link by selecting the “other” option in the drop down of designations.

The University is recognized by The Chronicle of Higher Education as a top producer of Fulbright Scholars, and the Library is a critical component of student and faculty research and scholarship.  In 2013, the Association of College and Research Libraries honored the Library with the Excellence in Academic Libraries Award for its outstanding accomplishments in furthering Villanova’s  educational mission – yet there remains opportunities for Falvey to do more in support of Villanova’s student-scholars.

Help the Library this Giving Tuesday to continue to evolve to meet the needs of modern students, acting as the campus’ academic and intellectual hub and a point of alumni pride.

Falvey Memorial Library by the Numbers:
Falvey teems with students seeking study space, essential resources and librarians to guide their research and studies.  But did you know just how much support the Library provides students and faculty?

In 2017-18 academic year:

• Students, faculty, and community members visited the Library approximately 600,000 times.
• The collection was used over 1 million times, including 370,000 digital chapters and 630,000 journal articles.
• Librarian staff provided more than 2,300 annual in-person and online consultations.
• The Library hosted more than 900 academic and social events.

Falvey Memorial Library has never been more essential to the campus community, providing resources vital to student and faculty academic and research success.

Give to support the Library today!

One of the greatest success stories of the digital library is exposing hitherto unknown or extremely rare works to an audience comprised of scholars and the international public. At Villanova’s Digital Library a source of these works includes the many individual donors that have decided to both preserve and make accessible historical treasures through “Digital Donation”. Our team digitizes the original items and places a preservation copy of the work in our digital collection; the original items are promptly returned to the owner. This ensures both exposure of the work to an audience of over 4,000 unique visitors a month (March 2008 statistics) and continued digital curation of the work even if disaster or the ravages of time erode the original physical copy to fragments. Digitally donated items are also fully described by professional catalogers using metadata standards to enhance the individual work’s findability. Finally, the work is exposed to the community of scholars via several metadata aggregators, including: OCLC’s Worldcat and Registry of Digital Masters; the Pennsylvania Digital Library (PADL); and OAIster using Open Archives Initiative.

Items that have been digitally donated include copies of published works, some annotated by notable personages:

Memoranda during the War

by Walt Whitman (these are his memoirs from the time of the American Civil War; the donated copy is hand signed by Walt Whitman for Miss E.N. Morris):

The complete poetical works of William Wordsworth

(donated copy was owned and annotated by Herman Melville):

The Prayer of Lapsong : one cat’s journey to peace

by Scott Grapin (signed and illustrated by the author).

Other works originally unpublished, and now published by the Digital Library for the first time as online works, include digitally donated letters, property and government documents relating to the history of the United States (Nagy and Humbert Collections), and local Radnor Township history (featuring donated works related to the Radnor Memorial Library and the Radnor Friends Meeting). And immediately waiting in the wings to be added to digital library collections later this year are other donated works including Villanova faculty scholarship, English genealogical research materials, and an extensive manuscript detailing the journey of a young man, there-and-back, to the California gold-fields in the Gold Rush.

If you own heritage materials, including letters, pamphlets, newspapers, rare books, or photographs, that you would like to see preserved and made accessible, please contact the Digital Library Team at: digitallibrary@villanova.edu

Of course, not all materials are able to be digitized due to fragile or incomplete physical condition; in some cases works are not suitable for donation due to collection focus or intellectual property rights. All donated works must be in the public domain or the donor, who owns the intellectual property rights to an unpublished or in-copyright work, agrees to make the work accessible via a Creative Commons license. Many works in the Digital Library that have been digitally donated (or are owned by Villanova University ) are thus made available to the public under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.