Bill - unless you are fairly high up where the air is really clean, atmospheric particulates as well as heat waves near ground level are going to disturb sharpness more than UV. But under ideal conditions, an appropriate skylight or UV filter will make a difference in that respect, especially is you are planning on a high degree of enlargement of the original shot. More often the symptom is a shift in color toward bluer. Just how much varies with specific film type. But most camera lenses still pass enough UV for this to be an evident problem in color photography. With most black and white work, much stronger contrast filter are in play, which eliminate the issue. The exception would be deep blue filters, which will give you an effect like old blue-sensitive plates. I'm not personally after any kind of old-time look, but sometimes do include blue filters in my kit to enhance atmospheric effects and the openness of shadows, versus the conventional "black sky" mentality. Since I do this mainly in conjunction with 8X10 film, a slight loss of film sharpness due to UV is so minuscule as to be visually nonexistent in a typical 2X to 3X enlargement.
There obviously were UV-transmitting lenses made for scientific purposes, including special microscope lenses. These are rather rare except in the medical field. Sometimes they were related to special astrophotography. But most ordinary camera lenses transmit a fair amount of UV anyway. That's why there's still an abundance of UV and skylight filters being made; even digital camera exposures are affected to some extent by UV.
Another example is so-called museum picture framing glass. Some of these are not only optically coated, but exist in sandwich style much like a Tiffen filter, with a thin pale amber film in between. But if you seriously test some of these materials under a strong UV source like direct window light, even all three cumulative layers of glass plus the internal UV film only slows down UV fading a certain amount. Transmission specifications don't tell the whole story, because every little bit of UV adds up, and the actual prolongation of the life of the print behind that glass might only be another 5 to 15%, depending.
In other words, you're eventually doomed if the display illumination source even carries UV. If you need something to block all of it, it will so alter the color of the displayed image itself as to be useless. Even mildly tinted amber or pinkish version spoil the saturation of blue and cyan hues.
UV destroys most pigments too, and will eat alive most of the colorants of an inkjet print over time, which is only partially pigment-colored anyway. If you want to see true permanent pigments, look at the surface of Mars - all red and ochre oxides, maybe some greenish chromium ones too. But we need a certain amount of UV to stay alive. Now there's evidence that even Neanderthals in the cold dark north probably had light skin color, blonde hair, and blue eyes to admit more UV.
