Libraries & Digital Learning

Banned Books Week is one of those moments when libraries are invited to highlight the values at the core of our work. This year, the Libraries and Digital Learning team embraced that opportunity. Over the course of the week, our events offered a shared reminder of why libraries matter: to support access, encourage thoughtful engagement, and ensure that a wide range of ideas remains available to readers.

We began with a community reading of 1984. Students, faculty, staff, and community members gathered to read aloud, listen, and talk about surveillance, language, power, and what happens when truth becomes negotiable. It was communal, unsettling, and oddly energizing. Maybe exactly as Orwell intended.

For those who prefer a little mystery with their intellectual freedom, our Blind Date with a Banned Book offered the joy of literary chance. Wrapped books, minimal clues, no spoilers but just the thrill of checking out something that has, at some point, made someone nervous enough to try to erase it.

The week also marked the opening of Celebrate the People’s History, featuring powerful prints by Josh MacPhee. The exhibit foregrounds grassroots movements, radical imagination, and visual storytelling as tools of critical thinking and dialogue. Installed in the A level gallery of the library, the work made a clear point: banned ideas do not stay buried. They become posters, pamphlets, and rallying cries.

Next, we turned from reading banned ideas to making them. Our zine-making workshop invited participants to respond creatively to censorship, banned texts, and suppressed histories. Armed with photocopies, markers, and a healthy disregard for polish, students produced zines that were raw, funny, angry, thoughtful, and deeply personal. It was hands-on, low-stakes, and quietly radical…proof that intellectual freedom is not just something you defend; it’s something you practice.

We closed the week with a standout lecture by Emily Drabinski, whose reflections on censorship, classification, and power reminded us that banning books is not just about books. It’s about whose voices are legitimized, whose knowledge is preserved, and who gets to decide. Libraries, she argued are not neutral spaces, but ethical ones.

Taken together, Banned Books Week was less a celebration but more of a commitment to intellectual freedom, to discomfort, to creative resistance, to the belief that ideas are not made safer by silencing them and that libraries remain one of the last, best places where complexity is not only allowed, but enthusiastically made.

There are many AI-based tools under constant development that can help you locate, understand, and/or summarize research literature. A non-exhaustive list would include: Semantic Scholar, Elicit, Research Rabbit, Perplexity, Consensus, and Scite. They vary in the types of sources they index and the format of their search results, but they commonly attempt to summarize and distill large and complex amounts of information for you.

They each have their pros and cons, but can they replace JSTOR or your favorite library database? Not yet. Here are a few tools to look at more closely – they all draw on Semantic Scholar’s corpus of sources, but they present content in very different ways.

Semantic Scholar: In existence for a few years already, Semantic Scholar partners with publishers in STEM and social sciences to access scholarly content. When you type in a search, the results will look similar to Google Scholar, with the exception of the TLDR article summary. Click “Expand” at the end of the summary and you can read the article’s abstract. If you click on the article title you can follow the citation network for the paper: its references, citations, and “related papers.” The drawback appears to be its search algorithm, which does not always understand your search string or question. Nevertheless, you can potentially discover different sources than if you use Google Scholar alone.

Elicit: Elicit borrows Semantic Scholar’s corpus of literature and puts an entirely different user interface and searching algorithm on top of it.  Elicit built a strong user following on its model involving the “Top 4” papers and a TLDR summary.  But as of Fall 2025 Elicit now generates a detailed, synthesized report for you, which can take several minutes.  The report includes an abstract and detailed analyses of each of the sources used for the report.

Research Rabbit: Research Rabbit also borrows content from Semantic Scholar. It is primarily a citation mapper, rather than a search engine, and works best if you “feed” it a few papers first. For this task, it can sync with Zotero and upload collections or folders. From there, explore references, citations, and “similar work.” Confirmation bias is a risk, of course, but nevertheless and it can be revealing to “go down a rabbit hole,” as it were, as you uncover the scholarly communication thread.

Overall, literature research stands to greatly benefit from AI-based tools, especially when you are navigating citation networks, uncovering buried sources, and exploring research topics. But don’t remove your JSTOR bookmark yet.

[Updated 10/8/2025]