#LibraryNews

Open Access Week is celebrated every year to celebrate and champion open access resources. If you’re unfamiliar with open access resources, check out this blog post from 2023 that gives a history of Open Access Week, and defines open access.

Many open access resources are text based, such as open access journals, textbooks, and books. Publishing through an open-access model gives authors more control over their work, and allows more readers to find, and engage with their materials. In academia, open access resources can be great resources for students, as there is no cost barrier to accessing the materials. (If you’re a professor at Loras and interested in using an open educational resources, check out this page. If you’re interested in creating an open educational resource, check out this page)

Open-access resources cover more than just text-based materials. Images can also be open access, often through a Creative Commons license, which allows the creator to still retain some rights over their intellectual property, while also allowing others to use it freely. (Interested in learning more about creative commons licenses? Click here for general info!) Creative Commons zero, or CC0, is a license that allows free use, reuse, and remixing of items. 

Many of the largest museums in the world have begun the process of making items in their collection that are in the public domain available under CC0, which means you can freely make use of those items. You can alter CC0 artwork, use it in your own works of art, sell copies of it, do whatever you’d like with it. (It’s important to check that the item you’re using is in the public domain, and what the license on that item is.) This can be a great way to decorate your home inexpensively, or to add to assignments that need artwork in the public domain. 

Here’s some of the most prominent museums with open access collections: 
    The Met

    The Smithsonian 

    The National Gallery of Art

    The Art Institute of Chicago

    The Cleveland Museum of Art

Thanks to these images being shared under CC0, there are many websites that do creative things with open access artwork. This site is a clock that uses art from the Smithsonian’s open access collections to tell the time. This website, from the Cooper-Hewitt Museum (part of the Smithsonian) has you write on the left side, as it pulls images from the Smithsonian that contain similar words and displays them on the right. The Cleveland Museum of Art lets you view many items in their collection in 3-D, such as this suit of armor for a knight and his charger, or this Hittite statue.

For more information, check out our Open Access display on the fourth floor of the library.

The Society of American Archivists have declared October American Archives Month. American Archives Month is intended to raise public awareness about the importance of historic documents and records, and of archives and archivists to our communities.

Here at Loras, our archive is closely associated with the Center for Dubuque History. They are both housed on the first floor of the Loras College Library, and they both preserve documents, photographs, and other items that help tell the history of Dubuque, of Loras College (or Columbia College, Dubuque College, St. Joseph’s College, Mount St. Bernard Seminary, St. Raphael’s Seminary, or whatever name Loras went by at the time), and the rest of the community. In the archives, you can browse through old yearbooks (Purgold, Restrosum, Lorian Year in Review), view old magazines, old photos of campus and Dubuque, look through scrapbooks, and so much more. Heidi Pettitt, the archivist here at Loras College Library (and director for the Center for Dubuque History) recommends looking through the Hoffmann-Schneider Funeral records. While funeral records may at first not seem like the most entertaining records, they are incredibly useful and interesting resources that tell us more about what life was like in the past through rituals around death.  

Archival collections, here and at other archives, are incredibly important tools for historians, and other scholars. The primary sources found in archives are essential components of historians’ work. Genealogists rely upon archival records as they research family trees. These collections help researchers, regardless of discipline, bring history to life. Archival records go beyond dry old files (though there are plenty of those in archival collections as well) and include documents and photos that allow us to glimpse the past.  

While time travel is impossible, looking through an old diary, examining old photographs, reading letters, all allow us to, if only for a brief moment, glimpse the past. We will never know what it was like to arrive in what is now Dubuque before the city was built, what it was like to witness the crash of the stock market and the ensuing Great Depression, or what it felt like the first year women were allowed to study at Loras, but we can begin to piece together all of those events through archival records.  

Don’t discount archival records as you research. You can never tell what new discovery you’ll make!  

To see for yourself, visit this page, and set up an appointment to view archival collections here. 

Banned Books Week is an annual event sponsored by the American Library Association (ALA) and the Banned Books Coalition. Banned Books Week began in 1982, in response to a sudden surge in book challenges, and is held yearly, highlighting the books that have been challenged the most in the previous year, in a celebration of the freedom to read, even when books are challenged. This year’s theme is, “Censorship is so 1984. Read for your rights.” ALA President Cindy Hohl says, “The 2025 theme of Banned Books Week serves as a reminder that censorship efforts persist to this day. We must always come together to stand up for the right to read.”

Book challenges and bans have increased drastically in the last five years, both in Iowa and across the country. There is an ongoing court case in Iowa, Penguin Random House v. Robbins, where Penguin Random House, the Iowa State Education Association, a group of popular authors, Iowa parents, and others have challenged a 2023 Iowa State Law banning books. Read more about the court case here. Read about an injunction filed against that law earlier here.

The celebration of Banned Books week is a celebration of the freedom to read. The Banned Books Honors group is partnering with the Philosophy Department to host a philosophical exploration of banned books, examining the ethical, political, and cultural questions raised by censorship and the suppression of Ideas on October 9 in the Loras College Pub from 7-8:30pm. 

If you can’t make it to the event in the Pub, you can participate in Banned Books Week by reading a banned book, and learning more about the dangers of censorship and what it looks like in 2025. For more ideas, check out this page from the ALA.

Every year the ALA creates a list of the top 10 banned books of the previous year, drawing on data from news stories and voluntary reporting from libraries around the United States. With top 10 lists dating back to 1999, the lists record the titles of banned books, as well as the reasons they were banned, showing the shifting reasons books are challenged and banned. Check out this year’s list here.

Interested in reading banned books? Check out our collection of banned books on the 1st floor, and see what the fuss is all about for yourself. Interested in the 2024 data on banned books? Here’s the official Banned Books Week website.