I was inspired this fall semester—my first at Vanderbilt—by the resilience of our campus community. Like so many of our colleagues in academic libraries around the country, we prepared for the semester with several questions in mind. How would our students use our spaces in the post-pandemic period? Would they be willing to attend in-person instruction? In fact, foot traffic in the libraries shot through the roof this fall. Students were back in droves and the once-dormant libraries were vibrant hubs of discovery. And while our librarians used lessons learned from our remote time to offer hybrid instruction and off-site support, we were unabashedly thrilled by students settling into the campus libraries.
Moreover, the demand for our student engagement programs as exemplified in the Buchanan Library Fellowship program has never been higher. The fellowship is one very important way in which the libraries provide experiential learning for our students, connecting them with primary resources, technology, and media that promotes discovery, develops critical thinking skills, and positively impacts their intellectual journeys at Vanderbilt.
As we plan for our future, we are grateful to be seen as a place that inspires discovery and intellectual curiosity, and we take that trust seriously. As the representation of the academy’s collective wisdom, we will build partnerships among learners and thinkers to inspire knowledge creation. We will provide programs that seek to transform knowledge through the perspective of diverse disciplines. We will continuously embrace technology with greater commitment to collections, technological innovations, and greater discoverability of our collections.
The momentum that the libraries are building is heartening, but we could not do it without trust. There is something truly inspiring about a bustling library—it’s a place of hope.
University Librarian
Buchanan Library Fellows in Focus
.lateef img:hover {
opacity 0.5
}
Toy astronauts and a sombrero galaxy
Bringing university history to life
2022-2023: By the Numbers
Collections digitized by the libraries – a total of 434,300,700 MB
New e-books purchased and made accessible to the Vanderbilt Community
Total number of journals and databases available to Vanderbilt scholars
Views of Vanderbilt Television News Archives
Television news and commercials added
Added by the libraries
Peak occupancy in the Science & Engineering Library on Dec. 7, 2022
Peak space usage in Central Library on Dec. 9, 2022
Total in-person library visits
In the News (Oct. 1 – Dec. 31, 2022)
