Celebrating Open Access Week
Open Access Week, a global event now entering its tenth year, is an opportunity for the academic and research community to learn about the benefits of Open and inspire wider participation to make Open a new norm in scholarship, research and education. Open is the movement to remove access barriers to educational and research materials. Open resources are freely accessible (meaning they are not behind a paywall), and they may also be shared with open licenses. Open licensing moves away from the standard copyright model of “all rights reserved” to a model of “some rights reserved.” In other words, when creators share their work with an open license, it reduces the number of rights that they retain and allows the work to be used more freely by others. The concept of Open can apply to any kind of work: images, video, music, software, journal articles, books, data, textbooks and other educational materials.
This Cabell Screen exhibit includes dozens of images shared with Creative Commons licenses (the most commonly used open licenses). This means that you are free to use and share the images without permission—although we recommend double checking the license of specific images for other restrictions. The exhibit also includes images in the public domain, a term used to describe works that are not protected by copyright or whose copyright protection has expired. Anyone can use works in the public domain for any purpose without needing to get permission. The exhibit showcases just a small selection of VCU Libraries’ open access and public domain resources, as well as images from educational resources and works of scholarship created by members of the VCU community. All are freely accessible to those at VCU and around the world.
This year’s Open Access Week theme is “Open with Purpose: Taking Action to Build Structural Equity and Inclusion.” By eliminating financial barriers to accessing these images, we take one small step toward building structural equity and inclusion. But the images are just one part of the work VCU Libraries is undertaking to build this new foundation. We are also working on supporting the publication of scholarship and research findings that are accessible to all through VCU Publishing and the creation of customized course content through the Open and Affordable Course Content Initiative.
Open Educational Resources
Digital Histology is a digital atlas of histology with extensive descriptive text, developed by the VCU School of Medicine’s Department of Anatomy and Neurobiology, the School of Medicine’s Office of Faculty Affairs, and the VCU ALT Lab. This resource (including the selected images included in the Cabell Screen exhibit) is shared with a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. The Digital Histology project team is also one of the recipients of a VCU Affordable Course Content Award.
VCU Scholars Compass
VCU Scholars Compass is a publishing platform for the intellectual output of VCU’s academic, research and administrative communities. Its goal is to provide wide and stable access to the exemplary work of VCU’s faculty, researchers, students and staff. Included in this exhibit are:
- The cover of The Politics of Annexation: Oligarchic Power in a Southern City, a newly formatted and open access edition of the original 1982 book that includes a new preface, introduction, and index (published with a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license).
- The cover of Vol. 7 Iss. 1 (2020) of the Journal of Hip Hop Studies, a journal committed to publishing critically engaged, culturally relevant, rigorously researched, and astute analyses of Hip Hop (published with a CC BY 4.0 license).
VCU Libraries Digital Scholarship
VCU Libraries’ publishing capabilities include web-based projects developed in partnership with scholars and other subject matter experts, alongside preservation of underlying datasets in our repository. This Cabell Screen exhibit includes selections of images from two digital scholarship projects.
The Ancarrow Wildflower Digital Archive includes over 300 photographs taken by noted environmentalist Newton Ancarrow from 1968 to 1971 along the banks of the James River, and shared with a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
The Social Welfare History Project Image Portal brings together photographs, pamphlets, artifacts and documents chronicling the history of the nation’s response to human need, drawn from the collections of VCU Libraries and other participating institutions. The images included in this exhibit are in the public domain:
- Vote. [League of Women Voters poster]
- Cover of The Woman Citizen, February 23, 1918
- Cover of The Woman Citizen, January 5, 1918
- Cover of The Woman Citizen, January 19, 1918
- Register! Vote!
VCU Libraries Digital Collections
Our Digital Collections are primarily materials from VCU Libraries Special Collections and Archives, and range in subject matter from African-American history in Virginia to Richmond’s past and present, from the comic and cartooning arts to the history of VCU, from medical artifacts to oral histories.
The exhibit includes several photographs from the Farmville 1963 Civil Rights Protests, when protestors, including dozens of Black high school age students, used an array of protest tactics to draw attention to racial discrimination in Farmville, Virginia, the county seat of Prince Edward County. The 491 public domain photographs in this collection were taken by an amateur photographer hired by the Farmville Police Department, which intended to use them in court proceedings as evidence against any protesters who were arrested.
- Protesters at Grants/Safeway, Farmville, Va., August 1963, #024
- Protesters near Southside Sundry, Farmville, Va., July 1963, #005
- Protesters on Main Street, Farmville, Va., July 1963, #015
- Student protesters on Main Street, Farmville, Va., July 1963, #013
- Students seated at lunch counter, Farmville, Va., July 1963, #004
- Student protesters outside College Shoppe, Farmville, Va., July 1963, #001
- Student protesters outside College Shoppe, Farmville, Va., July 1963, #015
Other Digital Collections images included in the exhibit are:
- The cover of a September 1978 issue of the Commonwealth Times (the VCU student newspaper) envisioning the removal of the Stonewall Jackson monument on Monument Avenue. The Commonwealth Times archives includes issues from 1969 to 2011, shared with a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
- The cover of Fan Free Funnies No. 1, one of three issues of an all-comics black-and-white tabloid created by the Commonwealth Times in 1973, shared with a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
- Plates VII, VII, IX, and X from the Illustrated catalogue of art tiles made by J. G. & J. F. Low (1887), one of three public domain publications from the Low Art Tile Book Collection showcasing high relief decorative art tiles from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
VCU Libraries Flickr
VCU Libraries also shares images from our collections through Flickr to promote their discovery and use. Images from three albums are included in the exhibit:
- Artistic Tiles from the American Encaustic Tiling Company presents public domain images from the company’s Ceramic Mosaic Tile catalog. Plate 226, Plate 231, Plate 252, Plate 287, and Plate 288 depict a variety of colorful floor tile designs.
- Works of Art; Marks of Ownership presents a selection of signed bookplates by illustrator and woodcut print artist Julius J. Lankes (Adèle Goodman Clark papers). The bookplates of Julius B. Lankes, Buddy Lankes, and Jessie Comfort Smith are shared with a CC BY-NC 2.0 license.
- Rabier’s Laughing World, presents images from the books of illustrator Benjamin Rabier, shared with a CC BY-NC 2.0 license, including a Stern cat (a detail from Fables de La Fontaine) and a Laughing dog (a detail from Les Mesaventures d’un chien).
VCU Libraries Tumblr
VCU Libraries also shares images from our collections through Tumblr, including these public domain images included in the Cabell Screen exhibit:
- Smith & Anthony Co. trade card for Hub Ranges “exclusively used by the Boston and New York Cooking Schools,” ca. 1894. Part of the Charles E. Brownell Collection of Architectural and Decorative Arts Ephemera.
- Allen & Ginter trade card advertising “Our Little Beauties Cigarettes” die-cut trade cards. Part of the Charles E. Brownell Collection of Architectural and Decorative Arts Ephemera.
- Cover of Choice Recipes: Sauer’s Famous Flavoring Extracts. Available in VCU Libraries Special Collections and Archives, TX 715. C5 1915.