Message from Dean Burhanna

Friends,

As we start a new academic semester, I send my best wishes for wellness and success!


University Libraries kicked off the year by hosting nearly 2,000 students for our Late Night @ the Library celebration. Students enjoyed music, dancing, pizza (more 160 large pies), ice cream, video games, button-making and an array of other games. We want to thank our many university partners who help us make this event a success: Kent State Esports, Information Services, Athletics and the Center for Student Involvement. Also, we thank University Facilities Management and Housekeeping for helping behind the scenes. 

As we head into a new semester, I want to share several recent, ongoing and upcoming news items from the University Libraries family:

• Alison Caplan joined us as the new director of the May 4 Visitors Center. 
• Fourteen faculty members received grants to adopt, adapt and author open educational resources to help lower student costs. Thanks to Provost Tankersley for supporting this initiative. 
• Our new Fashion Library recently opened. We plan to celebrate with a ribbon-cutting ceremony on October 20, the Friday before Homecoming. Glimpses of the space can be seen at the Fashion Library’s website. 
• We are proud to share that we’ve made several enhancements to our Quiet Study floor. These include 10 privacy loungers (pictured below), several study carrels and 90 new chairs.
  
   
• University Libraries was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities grant totaling $165,947 to digitize sketchbooks and pressbooks from award-winning couturiere designer Pauline Trigere. 
• Our Open Access Publishing Fund is open for requests. This program is a partnership between University Libraries, Research and Economic Development and the University Research Council. During the last year, this program provided more than $24,000 in funding to over 25 authors to support open access publishing.  
• We look forward to our annual Constitution Day program to be held on Monday, Sept. 18. Fabrizio Ricciardelli, Ph.D., director of the Kent State University Florence Program and historian, will give a keynote followed by student panel discussion. The event is co-sponsored by the Kent State Pre-Law Center. 
• We continue celebrating the digitization of the Lafayette Tolliver Photograph Collection through our exhibit Lafayette Tolliver: Visual Footprints in Time, which is on display in our first-floor Marovitz Gallery through October. 

We are grateful to all of you, our partners, patrons and collaborators. We do very little by ourselves, but together, we accomplish a great deal. Thank you for your support and we hope to see you, online or in-person, in our libraries soon. 

Ken Burhanna
Dean, University Libraries