University Libraries News

As part of our regular “We Are!” feature, we recognize 17 Penn Staters who have gone above and beyond what’s asked of them in their work at the University.   

Penn State University Libraries recognized 13 outstanding faculty and staff on April 10. Faculty and staff based at the Penn State Berks, Harrisburg, Hershey and University Park campuses were recognized.

No matter where Penn State students conduct research, Penn State University Libraries offers a diverse array of research assistance tailored to every student’s needs and comfort. 

A group of 17 academic leaders from across Penn State recently completed the 2025 Excellence in Academic Leadership program — an experience designed to strengthen leadership effectiveness and support ongoing professional growth.

"Alice in Wonderland," "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." at Penn State York, and a wellness day at Stone Valley Recreation Area are among the cultural highlights across the University this weekend and next week.

As part of its commitment to fostering student wellness and academic success, Penn State University Libraries now offers a Virtual Sensory Room to empower students with digital tools to help them manage overstimulation, relieve stress and sharpen focus.

Penn State University Libraries has opened the application for the 2025–26 OER Leads Faculty Adoption Grants. OER Adoption Grants give faculty the opportunity to customize their courses to adopt open educational resources (OER), thus ensuring their students have free and ongoing access to their course materials.

Thirty-one graduate students received awards at the 2025 Graduate Exhibition, a professional development event designed to help graduate students hone their skills with communicating research and creative scholarship to a general audience. 

The Penn State Open Scholarship Initiative, with support from Penn State University Libraries, will host “Retractions: On the Rise, But Not Enough,” a talk by Ivan Oransky, co-founder of the Retraction Watch blog, on April 21. The presentation will take place at 3 p.m. in Foster Auditorium, Paterno Library.

Penn State University Libraries’ hybrid 2025 William D. Minter Lectureship in Conservation on Thursday, April 24, will feature guest lecturer Randy Silverman, an internationally recognized, innovative expert in preservation and disaster recovery and leader in safeguarding global documentary cultural heritage.

The 2025 Charles W. Mann Jr. Lecture in the Book Arts titled "Document, Celebrate, Testify, Resist: Queer History through Book Arts" will take place virtually from 4-5:15 p.m. on Thursday, April 17, and is free and open to all, though registration is required.

Nationally renowned fiction writer Jamil Jan Kochai will offer a free reading as part of this year’s Mary E. Rolling Reading Series at 6 p.m. on Thursday, April 10, in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.

As a land-grant research library system, Penn State University Libraries provides all Pennsylvania residents with borrowing privileges for their collections. Several campuses across the state have entered into collaborative agreements with their local public libraries to make that access even easier.

On April 23, Penn State University Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communications and Copyright will present a workshop for Penn State Harrisburg faculty on avoiding predatory publishers. The workshop will take place from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Morrison Gallery at Madlyn L. Hanes Library, Penn State Harrisburg.

Teaching and Learning with Technology invites Penn State teaching faculty to apply for its May 12–14 Digital Education Exchange Retreat 2025, which will focus on creating Technology-Enhanced Instructional Materials (TEIMs) that leverage generative AI tools.

Award-winning authors V.V. Ganeshananthan, Cheran Rudramoorthy, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and Indran Amirthanayagam will participate in "Writing in Displacement: A Day of Readings and Conversations with Sri Lankan Writers" taking place from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. Friday, April 4, in Paterno Library's Foster Auditorium.

Penn State’s Teaching and Learning with Technology, part of Penn State University Libraries, is accepting applications through April 21 for the 2025-26 Faculty Engagement Awards. This year’s theme is “Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Teaching including Microsoft CoPilot 365.”

“Counting Winter,” written by Nancy White Carlstrom, illustrated by Claudia McGehee and published by Eerdmans Books for Young Readers, won the 2025 Lee Bennett Hopkins Poetry Award, presented annually to an American poet or anthologist for the most outstanding new book of poetry for children published in the previous calendar year.   

The Penn State College of Engineering’s Office of Corporate and Industry Engagement invites engineering faculty to I-CONNECT: Intellectual Property and Innovation. The event will take place virtually and on campus at 504 Engineering Collaborative Research and Education Building (ECoRE) from 12:30 to 2 p.m. ET on April 2. 

Eileen Cheng-yin Chow, associate professor of Asian and Middle Eastern studies at Duke University, will deliver the inaugural Janssen Lecture at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, March 28 in Paterno Library’s Foster Auditorium.