News & Blog

Pride Month has arrived!

While every day is a time to be proud of your identity and orientation, June is that extra special time for boldly celebrating with and for the LGBTQIA+ community (yes, there are more than lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender folx in the queer community). June was chosen to honor the Stonewall Riots which happened in 1969. Like other celebratory months, LGBT Pride Month started as a weeklong series of events and expanded into a full month of festivities.

2021 is also the 5^th anniversary of the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando where 49 members of our community were murdered on June 12, 2016. On the main floor of the John C. Hitt Library there will be display cases with items from the University Archives relating to Pulse memorials as well as a display wall honoring the lives lost. Both of these library memorials were created in partnership with UCF LGBTQ Services. UCF will also be hosting several events in June to help the community remember, grieve and grow stronger. Full listing of UCF events is available on the Pulse Remembrance event calendar.

Additional Pulse memorial events will be hosted by the onePULSE Foundation. An memorial archival collection from the first anniversary of the shooting can be found as part of the Resilience: Remembering Pulse in the STARS Citizen Curator collection.

In honor of Pride Month, UCF Library faculty and staff suggested books from the UCF collection that represent a wide array of queer authors and characters. Click on the link below to see the full list, descriptions, and catalog links. There is also an extensive physical display on the main floor of the John C. Hitt Library near the Research & Information Desk.

Featured Bookshelf: LGBTQIA+ Pride Month

The 15^th Annual Student Book Arts Competition Exhibit is now open. The exhibit features all student entries for this year’s competition. The competition promotes the practice of book arts made by undergraduate and graduate students. The judges were David Benjamin, department head of Special Collections & University Archives, and guest judge Mike Taylor, Florida based book artist.

This year’s winning artist book is “The Bacteria That Kept Coming Back” by Claudia Prado of Rollins College. An honorable mention was awarded to “Transparent Tranquility” by Shannon Ganeshram of UCF. Congratulations to both students! Their artist books will be placed in the permanent Book Arts & Typography Collection at UCF Libraries.

The exhibit is on the 4^th floor gallery of the John C. Hitt Library which runs from May 2021 through July 2021. For more information, email speccoll@ucf.edu.

“What does it mean when an item comes up as being in the Location: UCF ARC MAIN General Collection or UCF ARC MAIN Media?”

The video that was here is out of date and has been archived. Click here to download the video for viewing.

ARC stands for Automated Retrieval Center.  It is the building behind the Circulation desk and has bins three stories high that contains a large number of the library’s print collection and all DVDs.  When a request is placed on an item in the ARC Circulation staff will retrieve items and hold them at the desk for check out. 

In the catalog click under the item information you will see a link:  Place a Hold

Click on the link and log in with your NID and password. Near the bottom of the screen click on the button to Place Request.  You will be emailed by Circulation when your item(s) are ready for check out.

This process usually takes an hour or less.

For more information, take a look at our ARC page: library.ucf.edu/21st/arc/

Or take a look at the ARC in action through the windows on the 3rd floor or in the video below.

Lily Dubach started as a Student Assistant in the Acquisitions Department in 2014, then held part-time roles in other departments, including as Adjunct Librarian for the Office of Scholarly Communication before joining us full time as the Connect Librarian supporting the Valencia West Campus.  She has a Bachelor of Science from UCF and a Master of Science in Information from Florida State University.

Lily officially becomes the new Textbook Affordability Librarian on May 8, 2021. In this role, she collaborates with teaching faculty, librarians, instructional designers, and pertinent campus units to promote and transition traditional course content to affordable textbook alternatives. These textbook alternatives include open educational resources (OER) and library-sourced materials. To date, UCF faculty have taught over 950 classes using open or library-sourced materials, in turn reaching over 65,000 students and potentially saving them just over $6.7M as of Spring 2021.

For more information about how Lily can help you reduce textbook costs, visit our Textbook Affordability page.

Did you know that many books include chapters authored by experts? Our very own library faculty and staff have written book chapters included in published books.

This is the second post in our Library Author Spotlight Series. If you missed the first one, check out our post on books.