The Alliance for Virginia’s Students, formed to promote excellence in public education in the Commonwealth, is hosting a web page where students may easily voice their opinion to state representatives about the value of VIVA, the Virtual Library of Virginia.  Funding for VIVA is of great importance for the academic library community in the state.  VIVA has paid for access to electronic books, journals, and databases for all of Virginia’s public institutions of higher learning, saving their libraries millions of dollars, and allowing them to stretch their materials budgets. 

Without VIVA’s funding of resources such as Expanded Academic ASAP, America History and Life, Contemporary Authors, and the American Chemical Society Journals, JMU may not have had enough funds to purchase access to the hundreds of online scholarly JSTOR journals, LexisNexis Academic, or Readers’ Guide Retrospective. 

To help educate JMU students about VIVA’s valuable work, there is a box on the Library homepage at http://www.lib.jmu.edu:

Students may click to read about the importance of VIVA for JMU, and to view the list of over 100 electronic databases VIVA provides to Virginia colleges and universities.  Students can voice their opinion by choosing a student category, editing a letter from the Alliance for Virginia’s Students website, and zipping it off to their representatives in the General Assembly.  Time is of the essence, since the General Assembly is in session now, determining the budget for higher education during the next two years.  Show your support for VIVA now!

Note:  Patricia Hardesty is a member of VIVA's Outreach Committee.--ed.