News Bureau

The University Library is helping professors develop open access textbooks that their students can use free of charge, through grant funding from the Illinois State Library and the provost’s office.

Gerald McWorter, a University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign professor emeritus of African American studies and information sciences, donated his faculty and personal papers to the University Archives.

Deepfakes can help us communicate and explore new creative possibilities, but they can also be used to mislead and spread disinformation, says digital humanities librarian Mary Ton.

Former University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign track star Harold Osborn won two gold medals at the 1924 Paris Olympics. The U. of I.’s Student Life and Culture Archives has a collection of Osborn’s memorabilia from his athletic career, including his gold medals.

The Rare Book and Manuscript Library at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign has acquired a first edition of Plato’s works printed in Greek in the 16th century by the famous Venetian printing house Aldine Press.

The 15-millionth volume in the collection of the University Library is a copy of Walter of Henley’s 13th-century work “Hosbondrye,” one of the most influential works on agriculture and land management in the Middle Ages.

The Heavy Metals Project of the University Library will survey the 19th-century books in the Library’s collection and test those with their original cloth-covered bindings to determine if they contain traces of heavy metals in the pigments used for the covers.

Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign are part of the Doris Duke Native Oral History Revitalization Project, which aims to make ethnographic materials collected from Native American tribes accessible online and to return materials to those communities.

Linguistics professor Ryan Shosted and computer science professor Neal Davis are providing resources that they hope can shed light on the dialect and culture of late 19th-century Utah, as well as help answer other research questions.