This seminar discusses issues around inclusive collecting, barriers to access, ethical stewardship, and strategies for amplifying underrepresented voices.

How inclusive is our inclusion? A case of the struggle for knowledge sharing
Cathleen LeGrand, Visiting Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Leeds

This presentation reflects on collections and equity by looking at some of the limitations of efforts to make collections inclusive and accessible. It presents a composite case study of a Majority World institutional repository as a lens through which to look at current struggles to share knowledge. The case study is drawn real-world examples collected during international fieldwork conducted within libraries in The Bahamas, Bhutan, and Botswana.

It looks at some of the economic and socio-technical forces that affect what an institutional repository–expected to house unique local knowledge resources, make them accessible to the wider world, and keep them secure into the future–has the capacity to make visible and discoverable. It also considers the implications of local instabilities, material conditions, labour practices, and library workloads on what we can know and reflect on how institutions can engage with these challenges in the goal of achieving greater inclusivity.

Prioritising inclusive collection building in challenging times
Karen Jackson, Research and Academic Support Manager, University of Warwick

How do we make the case for inclusive collection building in the current financial climate? Exploring the challenges around the sometimes competing priorities of usage metrics and the drive for decolonisation, this talk outlines potential responses and creative ideas for developing more inclusive collections in times of financial constraint.

This talk introduces an ongoing collaborative project between Manchester’s Sikh community and the University of Manchester Library (UML), reflects on what it means to care for a cultural treasure that is also understood as a living being and how establishing dialogue with communities is crucial to framing decolonial practice with library collections.

UML has in its collections one of the oldest known copies of the Sri Guru Granth Sahib, one of the most sacred scriptures in the Sikh faith. The copy currently residing at the Rylands can trace its history back to 21 February 1849, when it was ‘wrested out of the hands of a Sikh Priest at the battle of Guzerat by an Officer of the 52nd Bengal Native Infantry’. It is regarded by Sikhs as the embodiment of the eleventh Guru and revered as a living person, as a result there are many acts of respect that must be considered when even consulting the text. Since 2021, UML has worked closely with the Sikh community in Manchester to conserve, digitise and respectfully care for the Sri Guru Granth Sahib. As well as this, UML have digitised other manuscripts relating to Sikh heritage in the collections and have worked with the community to digitise some of their personal material, adding to the rich history of Sikhi in Manchester. The manuscript has also been taken into the community and used during Vaisakhi festivities at a Manchester Gurdwara.

This is the first attempted decolonial act that the Rylands has undertaken. It has not been without its challenges and the library is very much at the beginning of addressing colonial collections at UML. Gurtek Singh, an honorary research fellow at the John Rylands Research Institute, and Jamie Robinson, Manager of the Rylands Heritage Imaging Lab discussed the work undertaken, reflect on their learning and consider future possibilities for decolonising the library.

This talk by Dr Justine Reilly, Strategic Director of The Neurodiverse Museum, focuses on the issues and barriers impacting on neurodivergent people in the museums and wider cultural sector. It explores neurodiversity and terminology, touches on the three pillars which underpin The Neurodiverse Museum – access, workforce and representation – and shares findings to support those wishing to create more equitable spaces for and with neurodivergent people.

The Neurodiverse Museum has been set up to change the way museums, and the cultural sector as a whole, approaches neurodiversity. They aim to shift the dialogue and provision from deficit, person first, exclusionary models, to presumed competence, identify first, inclusionary models with #ActuallyAutistic and neurodivergent voice at its heart.

In this lecture, Dr Natalie McGuire, Curator at Barbados Museum & Historical Society, explores decolonial museology through the case study of the Barbados Museum & Historical Society (BMHS), examining how the institution has sought to redistribute interpretive power and reimagine its collections as spaces of community-led knowledge sharing. Tracing the historical frameworks of museology in Barbados from its colonial origins to the shifting paradigms of post-independence and republic status the session situates local practice within global discourses of New Museology, anti-colonial resistance, and decolonial relationality (Mignolo).

Through projects such as Artistic Interventions (2018), LOOKA: Dismantling the Colonial Gaze (2024), and the Transoceanic Visual Exchange (TVE) triennial, the lecture highlights experimental models of democratic co-curatorship that foreground multivocality, accessibility, and community agency. These initiatives reflect a broader methodological framework developed by McGuire known as the Rhizomatic Research Methodology, which emphasises assemblage, relational ecologies, and localised approaches to decolonising knowledge production in museums.

By uncovering hidden narratives, interrogating visual hegemonies, and embracing collective authorship, the BMHS continues to challenge inherited structures of colonial museology. Ultimately, this talk proposes that decolonisation in museums is not a static act but an ongoing, relational process of redistributing institutional authority, amplifying community voices, and reconfiguring museums as living, multivocal ecologies of cultural meaning.

Dr McGuire has kindly provided the following resources for further reading on this topic:

• Multivocal Museology reading list
• Co-curating Memory: Deconstructing the silences around Caribbean migration to Britain
• The Case For A Rhizomatic Research Approach In Caribbean Museology
• Insurgents: Redefining Rebellion in Barbados

Building on the success of a previous event on this theme, this seminar features three case studies demonstrating how special and heritage collections support research libraries in advancing equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). The speakers share examples of good practice, from amplifying underrepresented voices to ensuring long-term accessibility through inclusive approaches.

This event draws inspiration from the recently published position paper, ‘On Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: a position paper by RLUK’s Special Collections and Heritage Network’. This position paper includes five objectives which underline the collective commitment of professionals in the network to EDI. The paper can also be used as a framework for helping institutions meet their EDI goals.

– Special for Everyone: Embedding EDI at Newcastle University Special Collections

Geraldine Hunwick talks about Special for Everyone, Newcastle University Special Collections’ multi-stranded project to address EDI in Special Collections at Newcastle University. She outlines the work they have carried out through the project to develop and apply signposting for difficult and problematic material in the collections, and some of the project’s engagement work to illuminate hidden voices and neglected narratives. She also talks specifically about the outputs of work with Dr Lucy Havens to apply Machine Learning models to identify gender bias in their archival catalogues’ metadata descriptions, thanks to a Research and Innovation Grant from The National Archives.

– Queer Perspective in the Archive: Exploring the outputs of an LGBTQ+ Internship

Rosaleen Williams, LGBTQ+ Intern, shares insights from her work with the University of Leeds Cultural Collections and Galleries. Rosaleen has worked to explore and celebrate queer narratives in the University’s collections, particularly around encouraging a queer perspective when researching archival material. From medieval manuscripts to modern feminist zines, this talk explores the challenges and possibilities around accessibility and representation of LGBTQ+ stories. Holly Smith, Archivist at Leeds, participates in the Q&A discussion for this presentation.

– Inclusive thinking: using collaborative methods to engage different audiences with ‘difficult collections’

This session focuses on the practitioner experience of collections-focused collaboration with a range of different audiences. The core example is the recent Prejudice in Power project, that consisted of a range of co-creation, community and academic initiatives that focussed on our holdings to respond to the university’s historic role in promoting eugenics. Sarah Aitchison and Erika Delbecque also discuss wider collaborative activity in UCL Special Collections, focusing in particular on pedagogical approaches in the design and delivery of teaching and student projects centred on difficult knowledges and collections. In the session, they share the lessons they have learnt and how they are embedding them into future practice.

This talk provides practical reflections on a recent project which brought together a group of visual artists from Zambia to explore methods of creative intervention and new ways to engage with archival material, particularly problematic colonial-era collections. Sally Kent and Eleanor Parmenter from Cambridge University Library reflect on the project’s artistic outputs as well as sharing their learnings from collaborating outside the library’s ‘traditional’ or ‘typical’ user bases. The speakers also discuss the administrative effort required to support creative practice research collaborations.

This seminar includes three case studies that showcase the role that special and heritage collections and archives play in enabling research libraries and their home institutions to meet their equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) goals. From making ‘hidden voices’ visible and engaging with diverse audiences to employing inclusive practices that will ensure long-term accessibility of collections, our speakers share examples of good practice towards greater equity and inclusion.

This event draws inspiration from the recently published position paper, ‘On Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion: a position paper by RLUK’s Special Collections and Heritage Network’. This position paper includes five objectives which underline the collective commitment of professionals in the network to EDI. The paper can also be used as a framework for helping institutions meet their EDI goals.

Imagining Illness: Sarah Roberts and the Art of Cultural Collections
Dr Rebecca Wade, Associate Curator: Cultural Collections, University of Leeds

Cultural Collections (formerly Special Collections) at the University of Leeds houses a significant and diverse range of artworks, artefacts, archives, manuscripts and rare books. While traditionally serving academic research and teaching, these collections have increasingly inspired creative practice through artist residencies. This paper presents a case study of Sarah Roberts’ 2024 residency, which culminated in the installation SICK (a note from 40 Sandilands Road and other stories) at the Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery (2 April – 19 July 2025). It explores how Roberts synthesised interdisciplinary materials from collections related to global conflict, domestic and family life, the history and philosophy of science, public health initiatives and the evolution of medical tourism, with her lived experience as a young carer and ‘sick-adjacent’ person.

Discovering Durham’s LGBTQ+ History in the University Archives
Dr Jonathan Bush, Research Engagement and Collections Development Archivist, Durham University
Jie Xu, PhD candidate in Visual Culture, Durham University

The history of LGBTQ+ communities within academic institutions, particularly the individual experience of staff and students, is often underrepresented or overlooked in official accounts. This reflects the wider historic stigma attached to normative perceptions of these communities and also highlights the difficulty of uncovering their hidden histories which are often buried within the archival record. This paper will present the findings of a project to uncover Durham University’s LGBTQ+ history and the lived experience of its LGBTQ+ staff and students, revealing a previously untold and often unexpected story of activism, community and creative expression within the University.

Accessible Preservation: developing an inclusive strategy for management and preservation of access quality born-digital assets
Ailie O’Hagan, Digital Preservation Librarian, Queen’s University Belfast

New digital apps and platforms are removing barriers to creation and engagement by transforming the way communities and creators make, access and share digital materials. While many institutions have adopted deposit systems and processes to cater for diverse born-digital collections, how can we ensure our preservation efforts are equally inclusive? This presentation explores a tool and findings from an RLUK-TNA Professional Fellowship project conducted at Queen’s University Belfast, which outlines new ways of thinking about digital objects to consider the motivations, technical capacity and resources of diverse creators to better inform digital preservation decisions and more inclusive management of digital assets.

As part of their efforts to decolonise practices and develop more inclusive, diverse and representative collections, cultural heritage bodies often work and think in terms of community. Typically this involves identifying communities that are underserved and under-represented, and exploring ways of working with them more closely, often through co-creation and co-curation projects. This approach informs much important, valuable work, and ‘community’ has become a largely uncontested term, used across the sector and generally treated as transparent.

But community is more complicated, prickly and elusive, in both theory and practice, than we often pretend. Among other issues, its embrace by cultural heritage bodies can sometimes result in its functioning as a mechanism of containment, even cultural ghettoisation: while superficially included, minoritised communities can find themselves held at arm’s length from anything like a public sphere, national discourse, or a meaningful place in national cultural institutions.

This presentation by Patrick Hart and Dora Petherbridge, Curators from the National Library of Scotland, uses an introduction to Fitba Research Club: Andrew Watson’s Legacies – a prizewinning co–curated community research project run at the National Library of Scotland in 2023/24 – as a way of thinking through some of the challenges and opportunities of ‘community’ for research libraries and other cultural institutions. The project brought together a team of young adult community curators from minoritised communities to explore the story of Scotland’s – and the world’s – first Black international football captain, to develop research skills and information literacy, and to research and celebrate the rich history of sporting achievement by Black people and people of colour in Scotland. Through a critical look at the project’s successes and shortcomings, this talk explores questions about the implications of approaching inclusivity and decolonisation predominantly in terms of ‘community’; about the role of libraries in facilitating and actively constructing new research communities; and about what it might mean to think of community as something that implies and requires a distinctive coming together of commonality and difference.

Musical events, though vibrant expressions of culture and identity, are the epitome of the ephemeral – performances literally disappear into thin air, particularly so in the period before recordings. But the collation and digitisation of surviving concert programmes, bills, and newspaper notices, for example, can yield data that get us some way towards understanding and re-experiencing them, as well as enabling us to analyse patterns and changes in performance cultures over time. High-street music venues – a key component of live performances – have become increasingly transitory in recent years, with public responses to closures highlighting their connectedness to place and communities. Once a venue no longer provides a regular time and place to meet, its communities disperse and become more virtual and imagined than real (in conventional terms) although drawn back to it just as strongly by the affective power of memories and shared experiences. In these circumstances it can be extremely challenging to try to (re)capture the intangible elements that defined lost venues for their patrons.

This presentation by Rachel Cowgill, Professor of Music at the University of York, explores different approaches to these challenges of ephemerality, as demonstrated in three of their current research projects. The InterMusE project, or The Internet of Musical Events: Digital Scholarship, Community, and the Archiving of Performance (AHRC), centres on a co-created community digital archive in which data-rich collections of highly formulaic homogeneous documents (such as concert programmes) can be combined with related but extremely heterogeneous groups of documents and artefacts (other forms of musical ephemera). Our Place is a DIY digital-archiving toolkit developed collaboratively for use by venue managers, owners and their patrons. And the Willow Community Digital Archive, part of the UKCRF- and HEIF-funded StreetLife project developed in partnership with the City of York Council, is a co-created community archive celebrating The Willow, a family-run Cantonese restaurant-cum-nightclub located in York’s Coney Street that closed abruptly after forty years in 2015. Technical work developing the archives at the heart of the first and third projects centres around the deployment of a general-purpose digital library framework, and she also provides details on some initial experiments with ChatGPT, investigating its potential to encourage new visitors to the archive to engage in narrative-building, and inspire further community contributions particularly in the form of memories and recollections.

This presentation by Guha Shankar, folklorist and cultural anthropologist at the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, surveys an initiative of the US national library to collaborate with a Native American community and developers of cutting-edge digital technology to address critical issues in cultural representation, co-curation, intellectual access, knowledge repatriation and preservation. On the one hand, the initiative foregrounds native communities as authorities over their cultural histories and heritage materials by integrating their own representations and cultural knowledge into library catalog records. On the other hand, the repatriation efforts provide the community with the materials necessary to revitalise dormant traditional cultural expressions by re-incorporating them into contemporary practice.

Lucy Havens reports on research combining Machine Learning (ML) and human-centered research methods to identify gender biased language in archival catalogue metadata descriptions. Though the ML community has achieved significant advances in language modeling, state-of-the-art models still have social biases encoded within them, the implications of which are under-explored. ML researchers and practitioners have focused more on minimising and removing bias than on understanding and managing bias. Adopting pre-trained ML models thus risks harm to marginalised communities that information and heritage professionals have been working to better represent. Motivated by information and heritage professionals’ desire to manage bias, as well as the scalability and efficiency that ML offers, Lucy has been investigating a new use case for ML: identifying bias. This work began during her Ph.D. research at the University of Edinburgh, where she created the first text classification models to identify gender biased language in the University’s archival catalog metadata descriptions. Now, thanks to a Research and Innovation Grant from The National Archives, she is building upon that work with Ian Johnson (Head of Special Collections & Archives) and the Newcastle University Special Collections team. In this talk, she provides an overview of the models and mixed-methods approach to their development and evaluation, and discusses insights this research has offered on the capabilities and limitations of ML for description and critical cataloging workflows.

Marginalised communities and nations worldwide struggle to overcome colonial mindsets in digital curation environments that keep their cultural heritage preservation at the margins. The high cost of digitisation equipment, computing infrastructure, and underinvestment in knowledge workers in the cultural heritage sector reinforce barriers to quality and sustainable preservation. Inclusion concepts echo the call to create ‘seats at the table’ but homegrown initiatives in this landscape show that both tables and seats must be created.

In order to reclaim the telling of its history, Barbados has launched a self-contained cultural heritage preservation and data analysis ecosystem program. Saving Barbados’ critical genealogical, governmental, and Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade records has taken centre stage, initiating a network of information management practitioners to digitally and physically protect these records. This talk by Jerrell Jones (Digital Initiatives Coordinator, Rice University) and John Connor Mulligan (Director of Digital Operations, Reclaiming Our Atlantic Destiny (ROAD) programme) contextualises the programmme, reviews aspects of the planning, and brings participants into some innovative work being done by Bajans to derive meaning from digitised content. These efforts integrate local work by new entrants to the GLAM sector with initiatives underway around the world, establishing Barbados as a full partner in the retelling of Atlantic history in the digital age.

The varied forms of cultural heritage, multiple stakeholders, and responsibility for public education drive GLAMs to promote equality, diversity, inclusion (EDI), anti-racism, and accessibility in all their activities. In this talk, Simon Mahony (UCL) and Yaming Fu (Shanghai) present their research, which builds on the “Shanghai Cultural Collections”, an online platform with various forms of historical collections concerning Shanghai. They created a framework to include the voices from diverse social groups that are usually silent, collect their stories, experiences, and memories about the collections using digital storytelling. The framework aims to raise awareness of the need for inclusivity and engagement, remove barriers to inclusion, and aims to remove the bias and implicit inequality often found in GLAMs collections, particularly in areas with a significant post-colonial legacy.

Like numerous European university libraries, VU Amsterdam struggles with the inherent colonial biases in the ways they collect, describe and present their materials. Their collections are biased towards western values and perspectives, lacking important but marginalised voices and containing outdated and offensive metadata. This directly influences students’ first contacts with academia. What do their collections say what good research is and who is allowed to participate in academia? VU Amsterdam has one of the most culturally diverse student populations in The Netherlands. Many students and staff might not feel represented and at home in our library while searching our online catalogue or browsing our shelves.

In this presentation, Michèle Meijer and Esther Nijland draw from the experience of their working group ‘Decolonization and collections’ to underline recent research’s important conclusions that despite being rooted in colonialism, libraries can contribute to the decolonization process

• Through practical interventions in their collection acquisition, description, and presentation processes;
• By seeking sustainable collaborations with students and staff as well as colleagues from other libraries;
• By helping spread awareness about decolonization and supporting diversity and decolonization initiatives within their own universities.

They first outline the practical interventions they (aim to) carry out for more inclusivity at their library, focusing on the domains of collection acquisition, description, and presentation. They discuss their progress, in particular with respect to the description of their collections, explaining in detail how they identified harmful subject headings and replaced them with respectful alternatives by using a tool from OCLC. They then address the challenges they are facing in creating more diverse and inclusive collections and how they think seeking collaborations on multiple levels and spreading awareness about decolonization can help overcome them. By discussing concrete examples and challenges, they aim to foster an open discussion, inviting colleagues across the UK and beyond to share their own experiences and ideas.

Kirsty Hassard and James Wylie, curators at V&A Dundee, discuss the museum’s decolonisation efforts within the Scottish Design Galleries since opening in 2018. They share insights gained from this process and explain how it has influenced the museum’s broader exhibition programming and future planned projects. Additionally, they detail how these efforts contributed to the development of V&A Dundee’s first major temporary exhibition, Tartan.

Those working in university archives will be familiar with a common complaint from a person accessing our archives – ‘Why have you organised these photographs by date? Wouldn’t it be better to organise them by location?’ The person might ask this because their research focuses on the locations of the photographs, where the dates do not matter so much to them. This is part and parcel of the work of the researcher, who must always do the labour of decentring the structure of collections when engaging in their research.

Archives and special collections must be structured and organised in order to make them discoverable. But what is hidden or minimised when we structure them in the way that we do, and who is it we are asking to do the work of ‘finding’ them? In this talk, LSE Library curator Daniel Payne shares a project he has been working on to help raise the profile of so-called ‘hidden’ parts of the collection, in response to an analysis of the Library’s flagship collections, in a project called Traces of South Asia.

How can archival collections be made not only accessible but fun and engaging for visually impaired audiences?

For the past year, Ellen Oredsson has been completing a project as part of the TNA/RLUK Professional Research Fellowship Scheme looking at how to answer this question as part of her role in the Education & Outreach department at The National Archives. Over the course of the year, she has talked to experts and people with lived experiences and have explored everything from magnifiers to specialised iPads and tactile images. In this presentation, she shares what she has learnt so far when it comes to meeting the needs of these audiences and how she has practically implemented these learnings to expand the reach and accessibility of The National Archive’s collections and offerings.

Making collections more diverse, accessible, and inclusive is a priority for many collection-holding organisations, including research libraries and archives. Engaging with local and other communities and, especially, with underrepresented groups have become an integral part of current efforts to meet these goals.

This session showcases current approaches to engaging with different audience groups with the aim of making collections more accessible and diverse, but also for developing inclusive practices and increasing the reach of collections.

That’s Gay
Ross Wilkinson, Learning and Engagement Manager, Durham University
Ivy Hewett, Graduate Intern for the Art Collection, Durham University

This case study explores how Durham University Library and Collections promote inclusivity through their learning and engagement programmes, academic teaching, and exhibitions. Ross Wilkinson, Learning and Engagement Manager takes us through how the team have developed inclusivity, diversity and inclusion particularly of faith and LGBTQ+ groups, in their formal and informal programming. New curator Ivy Hewett, graduate student of the modules ran by the Library and Collections and now Graduate Intern for the Art Collection, presents on how their academic studies have directly impacted on discussions of inclusivity in their own exhibition due for 2025 at the oriental Musuem, entitled ‘That’s Gay’.

Open to all: the role of academic libraries in empowering inclusive learning
Sarah Todd, Library Inclusion Coordinator, University of Aberdeen

Discover how the University of Aberdeen fosters inclusive learning environments through accessible resources and services. This case study highlights the obstacles encountered by a student with a visual impairment, followed by a discussion on the library’s role in addressing these challenges. The presentation celebrates the library’s commitment to inclusivity and its impact on enhancing educational experiences for all.

Heartstopper! Sustaining the Library-LGBTQ Love Affair
David Wright, Associate Library Director for User Experience, University of Southampton

The importance of libraries to the LGBTQ+ community has a long history and was beautifully illustrated in a scene from the recent Channel 4 series Heartstopper. This presentation considers why libraries continue to matter to queer people and shares some ideas on how we can continue to diversify our collections and ensure positive engagement with our LGBTQ+ customers.

• Sohail Jannesari, Global Health Lecturer, Brighton and Sussex Medical School
• Ricardo Twumasi, Lecturer in Psychosis Studies, King’s College London
• Claire Camp, Collections Analytics Librarian, King’s College London
• Ruth Murphy, Associate Director (Education & Learning), King’s College London

In a decolonial project to disrupt traditional paradigms of academic publishing, a collaborative initiative was forged between a group of health inequalities researchers. With the support of King’s College London, Libraries & Collections, this synergy birthed ‘Stolen Tools’, a pioneering open-access journal providing a platform for voices historically relegated to the periphery of academic discourse.

Unlike conventional publishing frameworks that primarily evaluate a manuscript’s content before acceptance, this model adopts a proactive stance by accepting authors of colour at the ideation stage. It augments their scholarly journey by pairing them with seasoned academic mentors – termed ‘critical friends’. This symbiotic relationship nurtures innovative academic research. Central to this initiative is a decolonial ethos aimed at dismantling the ivory tower’s barriers that have hindered many potential authors from contributing to the academic discourse.

This model envisions a more inclusive, anti-racist, and democratic academic publishing landscape whereby diverse narratives and epistemologies are accorded a rightful place within academic scholarship. This talk outlines their journey so far, how the journal team and King’s Libraries & Collections have worked together and their plans for a crowd sourcing solidarity sponsorship model.

Reimagine Descriptive Workflows was an OCLC project to better understand and address harm caused by cultural institutions’ metadata and collection description practices.

In 2021-22, the project convened an international group of experts, practitioners, and community members to determine ways of improving descriptive practices, tools, infrastructure, and workflows in libraries and archives.

A year and a half after the publication of our community agenda, Reimagine Descriptive Workflows: A Community-informed Agenda for Reparative and Inclusive Descriptive Practice, Merrilee Proffitt and Jay Holloway from OCLC reflect on the report, how it has influenced the community, and how it has influenced OCLC.

Merrilee Proffitt is Senior Manager for the OCLC RLP. She provides community development skills and expert support to institutions within the OCLC Research Library Partnership.

Jay Holloway is the Director of End User Platform Services within the Global Product Management division at OCLC, where he focuses on the end-to-end user experience from discovery through delivery.

Links from the presentation:

• RDW project (links to publication) https://www.oclc.org/research/areas/community-catalysts/reimagine-descriptive-workflows.html
• 2017 EDI survey: https://hangingtogether.org/equity-diversity-and-inclusion-edi/
• 2020 interviews https://hangingtogether.org/towards-respectful-and-inclusive-description/
• Danskin, A. (2023). Challenging legacies at the British Library. Art Libraries Journal, 48(2), 38-42. doi:10.1017/alj.2023.4
• IFLA satellite conference blog post https://hangingtogether.org/colonial-heritage-collections-indigenous-knowledge-syst/
• Diversifying print collections https://hangingtogether.org/casting-a-different-net-diversifying-print-monograph-collecting-in-research-libraries/

Hannah Ishmael is the Collections and Research Manager at Black Cultural Archives, an independent archive based in Brixton, South London. Hannah completed her PhD on the 'Development of Black-led Archives in London' from the Department of Information Studies in UCL.

Citations:

This seminar brought together the recently graduated RLUK/TNA Professional Fellows to discuss the results of their projects. The 2022-2023 Professional Fellows investigated pressing issues around diversity and inclusion in cultural collections. Their projects looked at the opportunities and challenges involved in developing inclusive collections as well as best practices in surfacing diverse identities in catalogues and representing marginalised histories and voices. Their work also explored the value of understanding the needs of users and engaging with different communities in the process.

The RLUK/TNA Professional Fellowship Scheme enables staff from both organisations to gain experience and insight from one another, strengthen and diversify the relationship between them, and to overcome some of the collective challenges facing research and cultural organisations. Find more about the scheme here.

Diversity and inclusion in UK archival collection development – slides
Jenny Shaw, Collections Development Manager, Wellcome Collection

Jenny shares her research into how archives have attempted to develop their collections in more inclusive ways to include a wider range of perspectives. She will talk about how archival theory can support more diverse collecting, look at some archival practice, and explore some of the challenges of measuring progress.

Documenting Complex Histories: Inclusive Cataloguing and the Women’s Aid Archive – slides
Holly Smith, Project Archivist, Women’s Aid Federation of England Archive, University of Leeds

Holly introduces us to the Women’s Aid Federation of England Archive, talking through some of the ways her TNA/RLUK Professional Fellowship into inclusive cataloguing practice has affected her approach to documenting this significant collection.

Capturing Diversity: Challenging normative assumptions of Records Subjects – slides
Rachael Minott, Joint Head of Diversity Equity and Inclusion, The National Archives

Rachael shares her research into the user desire for diverse narratives in archives, and the ethical and practical considerations for capturing record subject and creators racial identity in archive catalogues. Exploring this within the frame of the need to challenge normative assumptions of person’s identity when information is absent.

The ability to conduct effective archival research is contingent upon several factors, including; institutional collection policies, (who decides what the collection priorities are?) Academic affiliation, (what access is there in academic institutional archives for public historians and community researchers who are unaffiliated?) Effective indexing and cataloging (how is this impacted by limited human resources in the archival sectors?) Digitisation and transcription, (to what extent have the archival and academic communities adopted digital migration measures for collections?) Disparate collections (how practical is is to travel to the various locations that house segments of related archival materials?)

These are practical questions that span the breadth of subject areas and the entire academic and archival sector. However, when contentious and problematic histories  are the subject (such as enslavement and colonialism) these barriers often become defensive harbours for deliberate, – as well as incidental – discriminatory practices. 

These include; limited or absent collection prioritisation of Black history. The rejection of contentious archival deposits that might show British or western society in a bad light. Furthermore, the lack of diversity in the higher echelons of the sector and the broader Academy, when combined with the prevalence of analogue archival materials, behind layers of bureaucracy, has resulted in limited access and a lack of research, by comparison to other subjects during similar periods, such as the Napoleonic wars, or the Industrial Revolution. 

These barriers were all encountered by Malik Al Nasir when he sought to trace his ancestry back through plantation slavery in Demerara. Malik took to purchasing archival materials related to his ancestral slave owners know as Sandbach Tinne and Co., in order to wrench control of the archival materials necessary to uncover his own enslaved and colonised history. 

To confront these questions and begin to eradicate these obstacles, Malik created The Sandbach Tinne Project. 

Now reading for PhD in history at University of Cambridge, Malik is working with museums, galleries, records offices and universities in the UK, USA and the Carribean, in an ambitious project to identify disparate Sandbach Tinne collections and to unite them digitally in one authoritative digital dataset, that can be researched, curated from and interacted with by academics and the public alike.

In his talk, Malik discussed the development of the project that will act as not only a pilot for a multi-agency approach to decolonisation of archival materials, but that will attempt to begin to decolonise the archival sector in the process. 

Higher Education institutions in the UK and beyond have been increasing efforts to decolonise the academic curriculum. The reason is often twofold and linked to the current need to offer modules and academic content that represent the interests of their diverse student communities as well as to tackle racism and inequality across the campus.

Research libraries play a leading role in the process of decolonisation through their collections and expert support of their staff, which in many cases has led to a review of existing institutional practices and processes. During this seminar, professionals from two RLUK research libraries discussed the role of the research library in decolonising the curriculum, shared their experiences and reflected on the opportunities and the challenges that this role involves.

Addressing the colonial legacies in the University of Liverpool’s heritage collections
Joanne Fitton, Deputy Director Libraries, Museums, Galleries, and Robyn Orr, Liaison Librarian for the School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool Library

This talk outlined the current project work on the heritage collections by Libraries, Museums & Galleries staff, and how this is related to, and informed by, academic, institutional and external partnerships.

Decolonising library collections: contemporary issues, practical solutions and examples from LSE
Kevin Wilson, Academic Liaison and Collection Development Manager, The London School of Economics and Political Science Library

In his presentation, Kevin provides a summary of the book chapter he contributed to ‘Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries’, edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt (Facet Publishing). The presentation includes a historical overview of the development of LSE Library’s collections and how a recent collection evaluation confirmed the strengths and weaknesses of those collections. It also focuses on bias within collection development and reading lists across academic disciplines. The presentation culminates in some practical tips that libraries can take to develop more diverse collections.

Libraries are the custodians of knowledge. If they focus only on knowledge from a particular cultural bias or historical frame of reference, then libraries are serving only that part of the population that shares those perspectives. A library that does not seek to include diverse sources of knowledge and inclusive perspectives on the use of such knowledge will only reinforce the divide between the Global North and the Global South. This at a time when the world requires different perspectives and different sources of knowledge to address the challenges of global magnitude that humanity is facing. In this sense, every library, no matter where it is located, is an essential part of a global knowledge network. By understanding and promoting the relationship between excellence and transformation in the collection and curation of knowledge, libraries are in a powerful position to build a universal knowledge archive that can serve all humanity.

This presentation summarises how the University of Cape Town (UCT) in South Africa builds on the relationship between excellence and transformation to strengthen sustainability across the institution. These three pillars form the basis of UCT’s institutional ecology as well as their call to serve South Africa and the wider world. This focus on the ecology of the university is expressed in their Vision 2030 strategic plan, which can be summed up in UCT’s massive transformative purpose: to unleash human potential to create a fair and just society. The presentation includes a brief description of the student protests since 2015, which gave voice to the disconnection students and staff members felt with the institution’s history and current approach to teaching, learning, curriculum, pedagogy and the archive and use of knowledge from different sources.

The presentation explains how UCT’s current approach to diversity and social inclusion in the academic project is built on the interaction of excellence, transformation and sustainability. In such a model, excellence is not about a specific standard set by a limited world view. Rather, it is achievable by everyone. Transformation involves not just meeting a quota for admissions or employment equity but rather creating conditions for everyone to express excellence, regardless of where they come from. This requires students to bring not only intellectual capacity to the academic project but also to gain the cultural capital that allows them to thrive in a university environment. Creating conditions for them to succeed, while enabling excellence, is transformation with integrity. Together, excellence and transformation promote the sustainability of the university ecology, including knowledge dissemination, culture, finances, our contribution to society, our impact on the environment, the people and the institutions around us, recognising that a higher education institution affects the wider society. If we focus on excellence without transformation, or vice versa, the university ecology will not be sustainable.

The presentation demonstrates how UCT Libraries puts into practice the belief that “historically advantaged institutions should have a moral obligation to share scholarly content for the advancement of research in the country as a whole and for the greater good of the public.”

What role do museums play in realigning and reflecting society? Platforms for dialogue and portals for action on issues from the legacies of slavery to decolonisation. Revolutionary thinkers and doers. Contemporary (and caring) curating, exhibitions, displays, and stories can reflect the here and now and hasten power sharing; but show an awareness of the journey and those that strove before us, from cabinets of curiosities to social justice museums.

Richard reflects on and reappraises contested histories and narratives through the lens of his time as Head of the International Slavery Museum (ISM), an activist museum challenging and framing racism, discrimination, and accepted convenient and dominant narratives.

The recent wellspring of interest in surfacing marginalised peoples’ histories has led to various projects across GLAM institutions focused on reevaluating description with user-centred discovery at the centre. By highlighting projects to reimaging description of racially inflammatory materials, and to increase access and awareness of African American cultural heritage materials at predominately White institutions, Dorothy Berry hopes to spark conversation around expanding access and reimagining descriptive possibilities.