Overview

Loyola University Chicago is a private Jesuit institution with a strong history of liberal arts and professional programs. The Loyola University Chicago Archives & Special Collections (LUCASC) develops and maintains collections that support current and future teaching, learning, and research. This collection supports the scholarly curiosity of our students, faculty, staff, the wider Loyola community, and researchers from outside Loyola.

Archivists use their expertise in collection management to ensure the health, balance, and cost effectiveness of our collections. We strive to maintain active collections; this involves the acquisition and preservation of resources to better support research and learning needs.

In selecting materials for our collections, our actions are based on the belief in the essential importance of intellectual curiosity, knowledge acquisition, and the human desire to create, and we endeavor to fully support these pursuits. We affirm the value of academic freedom and the free exploration of knowledge, consistent with the liberal arts foundations of Jesuit educational practices. We strive to build collections that support research and learning and that represent a multitude of perspectives. Informed by the University’s commitment to social justice, we take particular care to lift voices, communities, histories, and perspectives that have been historically diminished, marginalized and/or underrepresented in archives when they are encountered in our collections and/or when we seek to fill gaps in our collections.

Our collecting practices are based on our established collecting policy, which guides us in collecting with an eye toward offering a breadth and depth of materials that can sustain a wide variety of intellectual inquiries and pursuits.

Researchers

Researchers should consult this section for information on accessing the collections including making research appointments, how the collections are arranged and described, confidentiality of university records, potential harmful language, and reproduction and use of materials.

Research appointments must be made a least 48 hours in advance, not including weekends and holidays. Information on materials to be used (i.e. boxes from archival collections or call numbers for books) must be submitted at least 48 hours in advance of the research visit, not including weekends and holidays.

Collections

Anyone interested in how LUCASC collects, acquires, arranges and describes collections should consult this section. Also included here are policies on confidentiality of university records and harmful language.