 So in writing this paper, I found myself time travelling, which is a concept that I'd like to use often when I present papers. So I looked at material that I'd written in the recent past and other papers that I'd written since 2016 to really understand the distance travelled. I also asked myself what was the central question I was trying to answer in the Stuart Hall Library, questions of empire often kind of popping up within these papers that I've written. And it was less of an unanswerable question and more of my attempting to set out a paradoxical set of positions deliberately geared to enact some sort of change, whether that was within me or beyond me. My practice as a creator has been to position myself in parallel to a cast of actors. Sometimes they are people, sometimes they are places and sometimes they are memories or ghosts. Whatever role they play, they act as catalysts for a creative search, which is sometimes initially indecipherable. I don't know where it's going to end, but the search is always collaborative in that there must be an interplay between all or one of those elements to really feel like a transformation has taken place. For me, libraries have always occupied that space between people, places and the ghost of memory. I just didn't visit an art gallery, never mind a museum until I was about 17. But the public library was my second home as a child growing up in East London, located almost at the end of the road where I lived. I spent evenings, weekends and summer holidays in my local library. I learned to play chess, I learned to love books and without a doubt I experienced indescribable joy in my local library. I was free from the world of my parents and like any small child, I was lost in my own orbit crafted by the space of the library, which was definitely more than a home for books. I would say that I nurtured this passion silently until I became director and chief curator at Innevere in 2015. In fact, it was the Stuart Hall library that drew me back to Innevere. I'd started my career there as an assistant curator in the 1990s and left some six years later to work freelance. And similarly, I would say it was the library in the Reading Room at Wellcome Collection that was the icing on the cake that really whetted my appetite for becoming a museum director. However, the context could not be more different. On one hand, the Stuart Hall library lay at the nexus of cultural activism embedded within its fabric, a questioning of how knowledge and power is generated and dedicated to a de-centering received ideas of empire. And on the other, Wellcome Collection, being the embodiment of patriarchy via Henry Wellcome and his desire to collect the world through the prism of the Museum of Man. Because of this disparity, some of what you will hear today is episodic in part, and part oxymoronic as I posit a few thoughts on how libraries can be at the centre of creativity, innovation and flux whilst attempting paradoxically to bring about lasting change. I'm going to go back in time and talk about some of the work that was done at Innevere to centre the library as something more organic to the creative process, as well as something more malleable in terms of a space where knowledge and therefore power is generated. So episode one, Innevere. All that is solid melts into air. So Innevere was founded against a backdrop of changes in the UK in the 90s and as a response to an irrefutably changing world. After a concerted campaign by Black artists for greater representation in the mainstream visual arts, the organisation was established in 1994. The organisation grew out of a proposition by the Arts Council in a significant report released at the end of 1991. And that report was responding to a demand for a new kind of institution which might enhance the public enjoyment of and engagement with the work of artists of African and Asian descent. It was specific in suggesting how such an institution could develop a critical debate about the nature of modern art and actively support the new international dialogue. This new institution would aim to show a broad spectrum of contemporary visual arts practice and was currently available in Britain. It grew up in the era of multiculturalism through Britain's shifting political landscape from the new labour agenda of the new millennium to the present to the present Tory programme of austerity and cuts. In parallel, policy driven art imperatives begun as early as 1976 to the cultural diversity action plan and to where we find ourselves in recent years. We are now within the Arts Council's creative place for diversity, which attempted to move away from a legal framework to an ethically artistic and holistic one. And actually thinking about that in terms of where we are now with the Arts Council investment principles around inclusivity and relevance. Some significant change in how this question of the importance of diversity inclusion has been situated within the arts funding landscape. So a defining moment and an earlier reckoning for heritage spaces was the 99 conference called who's heritage, the impact of cultural diversity on Britain's living heritage. This event, which brought together arts and heritage services, and I think many of you probably know was aimed at measuring the impact of cultural diversity on Britain's living heritage was developed in response to particular kind of cultural and political background. So one was the growing awareness of the unsatisfactory track record of institutions as a whole and reflecting the diverse nature of society. The challenge of them that fierce reports into the Stephen Lawrence murder, which led to amendments of the various relations act. The growing strength of the movement within the African Caribbean and Asian communities to document and see documentation of their presence in the contribution in galleries, museums and archives in an attempt to recover hidden histories. And finally, understanding the increasingly shifting nature of concepts such as identity and national heritage and a need to revisit them in the light of shifts in society. So the opening of the conference Labour's government culture secretary secretary at that time Chris Smith admitted to the selective nature of history and then called for a more complete version of the truth. It now seems antithetical and positive positively radical given the current government rhetoric around the precarity of contested heritage. In an almost heartbreakingly prescient commentary, Smith outlined how whole sections of the community were forced to look elsewhere for reflections of their existence and contribution, and this was not acceptable in an inclusive society. He said that cultural institutions and funding bodies needed to put in place strategies to enable everyone to understand and appreciate their own cultural heritage and to experience those of other people. So remember this is 1999, not 2019. Professor Stuart Hall the sociologist and cultural theorist and in the first chair in his keynote speech at the conference suggested that the debate had moved on from notions of included and excluded. He marked, and I quote, an unsettling subversion of the foundational ground on which the process of heritage construction was until very recently proceeded. We see it reflected in different ways in how the tech supporting artworks and framing of exhibits are written by museums. In the attempts to make explicit the perspective, which has governed the selection and the interpretive contextualization, so as to make it more open to challenge and reinterpret. And the exposing of underlying assumptions of value, meaning and connection as part of a more dialogic relationship between the cultural institutions and their audiences. And in the tentative efforts to involve the subjects themselves in exhibiting processes which objectifies them. He states, these are only some of the manifest signs of a deep slow motion revolution in progress in the practices of cultural representation. The journalist, Mayor Jaggi, in the final keynote speech proposed that this new environment in turn provided even more challenges. The determinedly Eurocentric view of society's gatekeepers, i.e. many of the museums and galleries and attendance still erase perspectives of schools of artists and other creative voices repeatedly and thus invalidating whole cultures. She urged that the heritage we construct should not simply be a question of inclusion, but of perspective and participation. In 2019, the public historian David Olasoga gave a keynote at the Hughes Heritage Symposium, an anniversary event reflect on Stuart Hall's project to challenge the inequalities in the cultural heritage field. Olasoga remarked upon the deep slow revolution, which had in fact gathered pace but was still decidedly glacial with its poor statistics on levels of engagement and participation and inclusion with black and brown people within cultural institutions, whether they be audience members or member of staff occupying senior positions. Episode two, the Stuart Hall Library, things fall apart the centre cannot hold. As I mentioned earlier, I took up the position of Director of Innova in late 2015 and at that time I encountered a TED talk by the writer Chmimland Aditya, which some of you probably know. She warns of the danger of a single story, a story which flattens experience and presents stereotypes which don't complete the picture of the world. This idea of the single story became my reference point when I started thinking about what Innova and the Stuart Hall Library had been in the past and what it could be in the future. In developing a new vision for Innova, I understood that the incipient Innova could not or should not be disentangled from the Innova established in 1994, working as an agency or gallery without walls. Part of that new vision necessarily contained the vastly expanded Stuart Hall Library, which is a significant specialist arts collection focusing on the work of artists of African and Asian descent. It anchors Innova to a physical and intellectual space, giving much context to its work and programme of arts activity. The work of the library drove an ambition to build a greater body of knowledge around each of the artists, scholars and practitioners with whom Innova worked. It was a key plank in ensuring the legacy of their practices for future generations of researchers and audiences. Placing the library at the centre of the artistic programme has meant that this space, which acts both as a repository and a producer of knowledge, more than just underpinned on work, it moved from subject to object. Part of this revisioning was precipitated by the artist Ting Ting Cheng, who was the first artist in residence in the Stuart Hall Library and that happened in collaboration with the Stuart Hall Foundation. There have been previous interventions in the library in the past, which explored the relationship between text and narrative in conjunction with the visual and reveal the depth of the library beyond the idea of it solely as a repository for books, manuscripts and journals. Cheng's work, however, demanded more of the library, asking it to yield and become more pliable and reveal even more of its depth. You'll see that the beginning of this slide shows some of the images from the work, the installation, and actually it was a kind of walking tour that Cheng did. The slides obviously don't do it justice in terms of describing the experience. Cheng was born in Taipei and after her BA, she moved to London in the late 2000s. Her proposal for the Desert Island was submitted through an open call for the residency, and its starting point was Professor Stuart Hall's interview on BBC Radio 4 Desert Island Disc and it was in 2000. The work was presented in the library as an interactive audio site specific piece that provided a unique way to explore a unique collection that uses a categorization system to place exhibition catalogs according to their geographic location rather than the traditional system of order. Made in 2017 on the Desert Island imagines the library as a group of islands with its bookshelves and contents as landmass to be negotiated. The artist's narrated tour intertwined with clips of Hall's interview encouraged the listener to wander between Great Britain and Jamaica and its former colonies as if they were part of an archipelago. On this physical journey, the listener also follows Hall's conversation about identity and diversity over 20 years ago, heard in the context of pre-Brexit, post-referendum, Britain. Revisiting Professor Hall's commentary on the Desert Island cast a curious light on the political and social cultural realities where issues of sovereignty and the rise of uncontains in the phobia were as prophetic as he imagined. Professor Hall comments, Britain is facing two possibilities as alternative futures. I want the British to consciously move towards a more cosmopolitan idea of themselves. What is less discernible about the work and also a significant part of its appeal is the parallel narrative of Cheng's own arrival in this country and her experience as a migrant, as one who came to stay, as one who had to negotiate what it needs to be different from what or diverse from whom. Cheng writes in the blog about the work. I'll be coming to terms with that. What happened during the past 17 years? It's always a turning point. We can always turn. Like we always have been. There is no answer here. Probably there is no answer at all. It's just a thought, perhaps a journey, a journey that you're already participating in. The work was made over a period of three months where Cheng came into the library every day. And at that moment when she was making the work, one could nervously look over your shoulder and think, wonder if you could hold that time because of what had taken place in 2016. The Brexit referendum strangely coincided with the arrival of the Black Lives Matter movement to the UK and it drew connections with those in cultural spaces. Those working in cultural spaces demanding change to structural barriers not yet publicly called out as institutional racism. Depending on your viewpoint, several crises were converging or redemption had finally come to make people feel heard and valued. When I think back to the moment of Cheng's work, situated as it was in this post-Bexic moment, alongside the trauma of the Grenfell Tower of Fire, I could not imagine a world now viewed from the territory of the UK so mired, so stilted, so flawed by the collective global trauma elicited by the pandemic. Layered upon that, the multiple social movements such as Black Lives Matter that decried the murder and abuse of black and brown people at the hands of states of various countries across the world. More profoundly, the deep slow-motion revolution that Stuart Hall observed in 1999 is desperately trying to take on a more urgent momentum of its own fuel, as it is by those who work in and around cultural institutions calling out for change now, understanding that racism and ableism is all grounded in power and control. And I'm glad for this challenge because whether we like it or not, we are gatekeepers and guardians of a certain type of heritage, knowledge, pedagogies, and therefore we have the responsibility to really consider who's thought of particularly when we entered loaded spaces which hold special collections, what grounds or limits are thinking and our knowledge. The current discourse particularly around decolonisation has brought into sharp focus the need to start rethinking the most basic assumptions. We think our spaces of information openly share that information by partnering with communities who in themselves are not gatekeepers and experts in the field. The concept of decolonisation requires a constant critiquing to avoid the danger of being unmoored from its original political intents and ultimately misused. Whilst it can be put into play to undo colonial legacies, it has waywardly become defined as a contemporary expression, precariously used in the place of diversity and vice versa, which has its own set of intractable problems. Franz Fanon's definition of decolonisation from 1963 states, decolonisation as we know it is a historical process, that is to say it cannot be understood, it cannot become intelligible nor clear to itself, except in the exact measure that we can discern the movements which give it historical form and content. Historically a research library in the service of those in art or cultural education are designed around the individual use researcher rather than a community. Assumptions are made about what constitutes culture and what is of interest to history. At Innova I was told time and time again by young British, black and Asian artists that their cultural references were often not viewed or recognised as valid within their art education experience. The material in the Stewart Hall library and archive provides some restitution to those glaring emissions and narrow definitions of practice. How can libraries play a role in disavowing those rigid pedagogies of the past, which try to tell us that the way things that things have always been a particular way or history in all its glorious impartiality could never undermine the experience. Libraries and archives are bound to adhere to international standards and principles designed to make the world of knowledge supposedly more easily accessible. However, sometimes these standards perpetuate a mistruth that libraries and archives like museums are neutral spaces when in fact they represent curated partisan spaces. I am told by colleagues more knowledgeable than me that this is because librarians and catalogers are to a degree expected to use their own subjectivity to define the subject of resource in our knowledge management systems. These individual biases can reaffirm the European view of knowledge when we continue to use cataloging standards defined and set by the Library of Congress. So as part of ongoing work at Innova, the librarians started to challenge the categories of searching for information in the Stewart Hall library catalog and workshops exploring the impact of language and determining and shaping the knowledge that we acquire. It was found that the Library of Congress subject headings are problematic for representing the specific collections in the Stewart Hall library and that was because some of the subject categories are inherited from an accepted imperial and colonial attitude, especially when describing topics of race, gender, sexuality. As a result of the challenges presented by the Library of Congress headings, librarians at Innova have since started to devise its own subject theosaurus based on terminology used by authors and artists to describe their work to stand alongside Library of Congress subject headings. As a microcosm of what some libraries already do and do very well, it was important to understand that collections development and reader development feeds into each other. The research network program at Innova selected through an open call builds a network for sharing with groups of individuals, collectives and institutions that was reflective of the organization's ethos and resources that they collected. In addition, academic seminars re-appraising and re-centering important bodies of work by artists and scholars felt like a necessary objective for the library, seeking to reimagine itself as a recuperative space serving a wider community than an academic one. Episode three, well-concollection and unfinished conversation. At the point of joining well-concollection October 2019, unbeknownst to us, we were on the point of receiving archive service accreditation. The question that excited me the most during those various presentations was what does it mean to be a 21st Library and who is a 21st century researcher. My experience at Innova told me that the library had to turn itself inside out, become more porous, more malleable, mean more to more people who probably didn't even think of themselves as researchers but who without a doubt would find some version of themselves inscribed in the narratives contained in the library. If our mission and our central concern at well-concollection is to challenge how we all think and feel about health by connecting science, medicine, life and art, then part of that must be enabling greater access to our material, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, to be uncertain in order to truly allow new types of being and thinking around health to emerge. We're doing many things that I feel incredibly proud of as an institution cognisant of its own flaws and failings, much of which was mapped out almost a year ago in our anti-blackness and racism statement. I believe we're manifesting some pretty radical interventions to transform us into the organisation we want to be and have the potential to be in moments of crisis as much as fulfilment. These include the social justice curriculum, a peer-to-peer whole organisation development programme led by our inclusion practitioners, the transcription project led by a collections information team working side by side with colleagues in digital engagement. And we're currently embarking on inquiry to understand what direction we can go in to define the research library of the 21st century. This is led by our library experience and engagement team and its nascent project called Library Futures, but one I know will be central in achieving our mission. At present some parameters are being set and it is an internally focused piece of work, but it is already prodding at the membrane of the institution by asking, who can help us in this quest? Who can we learn from? What do we have to do deliberately with care and purpose which will require a massive shift in mindset? Our visitor experience assistants are demanding with persuasive authority that we begin to dismantle the imperial legacy, literally carved into the fabric of our space, most convincingly played out in the history of the reading room freeze. It feels particularly important to think about libraries now can act as recoupative spaces for solace and care that move beyond the idea of a service provision and more into the space of the imaginary where barriers real and imagined can be broken down. As an institution, we must also ask where we can really capitalise on our differences in space whose collection is dispersed throughout the museum, such as in the reading room. That will also help to provide us with an opportunity to rethink access to our collections, as we also redefine the idea for permanent collection gallery with the repurposing in 2022 of Medicine Man. The potential of the library in the reading room to focus into action and consider the kind of turn Cheng mentioned in her own migrant journey and simply ask who is the community reserve for what purpose and for why. Thank you. Thank you very much indeed. That was absolutely fascinating. Just as we wait for colleagues to compose their questions. I wonder if I could, if you could say more about what you see is the essential ingredients for a 21st century library. Well, yeah, I think there's a few people, quite a few people at welcome collection, putting their minds to it, but I suppose based on past experience. It's to do with who we who we imagine it to be in the library in the future. And I think a lot of the work that we're doing now is thinking about who we want to to engage with what kind of invitation we're crafting in terms of being a space where disabled people, black and brown people can kind of see themselves rather than see themselves apart from. And I think it's important to think about who we're doing that in collaboration with. I think scholars thinkers, creative practitioners artists are really vital for that process and see that process as a collaborative one rather than seeing as the one which is kind of handing over the burden of responsibility to those collaborators to kind of help us break down some of those barriers. The question of who we who we're having conversations with when we develop in collections, understanding what who the users are who the users are and who we want to. And yeah, who we're asking in terms of what they want to see and what the kinds of experiences they want to have in that space, we definitely need to be in listening and acting mode at the same time. Related to that, I wonder how you see the, your talk was a lot about you know how the library plays an active role in research rather than just being a repository of knowledge. How do you see your work in the welcome collection influencing the welcomes own research activities. Well, I guess, welcomes research activities. Yes, yes, welcome trust. Welcome trust. Well, there's, well, there's just, I think there are, there are, there are lots of opportunities, I think just because we're kind of in the midst of developing the new research programs, which look at these kind of key challenges. I think we already speak quite significantly to some of that work that's doing but I think we have to focus now as we kind of approach the development of our own strategy to talk about actually how we kind of amplify some of those, those challenge areas. And I think we'll begin to do this through some of the sort of new areas of work that are emerging, particularly around the new collections gallery, and within our kind of temporary exhibitions program. And through, I guess, some of the work that we're doing on our, through our kind of digital editorial and the kind of literally the stories that we're enabling people to talk about, which make those connections between the, the, the challenge areas. I think what we're going to, what we will be doing more of or what we would like to do more of is think about how we, we support PhD researchers, particularly in that area between whether humanities, I guess meets scientific research and discovery research. And we already do some of that now, but I think in our, in the work that we're doing around making the collections more accessible will probably be able to kind of invite, not just PhD researchers, but a whole range of researchers to help us to understand how, how our collections help us to directly kind of amplify some of those, the challenge areas, not some of them, but all of them. Thank you. We've had a couple of questions come in. First one's from Neil Grindley. You quoted Fanon as saying that decolonization cannot come about by friendly understanding. And from the, from our perspective in 2021 when we read in the press about culture wars in the UK and elsewhere, between what for short hand I'll call the woke and the unwoke. Does this mean that memory organizations must take sides and be militant? That's a brilliant question. It's a kind of the taking, I think you can be militant taking sides. I guess that for me, there seems to be a, there's a bit of a paradox there. I think there's, and also I think there's something deeper at play when we think about memory organizations, which are kind of, which is probably, you know, might be stating the obvious, but whose memories are we preserving? Whose memories are we taking care of? And in a sort of militant position might be to kind of really interrogate, to interrogate that. It doesn't necessarily mean you're taking sides. It probably means you're happily presenting a more complete picture of the world and representing and reflecting a more, more diverse cross section of society. Militancy doesn't necessarily need to be a sort of political about political opposition or even be party party political. But I do, you know, might be speaking to the wrong person in that regard, because I do see myself as being quite, quite strident because what I witness is a whole part of society who feel that they're not welcome into certain, into certain museums, places who, you know, in through research that we've done, well, no, that they, that they want to kind of engage with culture. So this isn't about some sort of, sort of evangelical mood to kind of say, you know, they must engage with culture. It's a given. So I suppose I've answered your question in a number of ways. It's both yes and no answer me and sometimes they're set those two, those two things, etc. Thank you. I mean, you spoke a bit there at the end about engagement. I've had a question from David Proser. Are there different strategies when thinking about widening engagement to the physical space compared to widening engagement to the digital space? Another great question. Thank you, David. Questions of access are really, are really key for us at the moment. And the one of the things we're thinking about is actually how the physical and the digital might become more responsive of each other. And how audiences engage with our collections without sort of stating the obvious. There is a kind of, there is a need to think about physical spaces differently and how we use interpretation when we're thinking about being more creating more inclusive environments. But we also need to think about language and whether that language that interpretation is experienced in a physical space or digital space. We have to think about the encounter with those words. There's there's a definitely a symmetry between how we think about the language we use and that's kind of it's a massive project that we're engaging with in the moment around inclusive language. But also thinking about the experience which isn't, which is a kind of a really significant piece of what we have to do, which isn't just thinking about the written word or the physical space or the audio. I think it's how there's a lot for us to think about in terms of making ourselves more accessible, particularly for visitors who are disabled. But I think there are some of the considerations who are some of the considerations are the same, but some of them are distinct dependent, dependent upon the space of the encounter. A question from Masu Koka. Speaking from a living experience, my in-laws are from a small town which is overwhelmingly South Asian. Many of them have never experienced a large library or museum and many don't see the value unless they experience it in a way that is meaningful to them. I wonder if Melanie can give her view on how we can enable such audiences to experience these collections and exhibitions in a way that invigorates them to have sustained engagement. Thanks Masud. That is, that's a massive question. I get, you know, I do always go back to my, I suppose, my own experience. And there's something about the proximity, you know, I suppose, like, you know, I grew up in the 70s, 1970s, and there was something about the proximity, the physical proximity to libraries that I was fortunate to have. And not everyone has that. So I suppose there are a number of things that can happen to enable that to be the case, which is actually going to the space where people are. And not always be, you know, technologies can be seen as this panacea, I guess, to kind of enable people to kind of have access. And whereas that's not always possible. So there is this kind of space between the physical and the digital that we have to think how do people encounter the material that we hold in the library. I'm not, I'm not sure how that's done. I see for a sort of, and this might be me sort of sidestepping the question a little bit Masud, but I see Britain as this kind of microcosm of the world and actually we shouldn't be when we think about the conversations that we're having. But the global, the sort of trans, the global can be represented in the translocal, and actually how do we engage with communities on our doorstep, and I don't mean literally within London, but within the UK, for whom we know that the material that we hold in our collections can speak profoundly to their life experiences. And we have to find a way to engage with those communities, you know, to think in a kind of more mobilized way of how those engagements occur. I am always a little bit stuck between the possibilities of kind of digital engagement through the internet, and the possible of physical engagement, because there are kind of limits to both. And I'm not sure what the space is in between. And I know that there are people out there thinking this through and have really great ideas around it, but it's a real, yeah, it's a real conundrum. Thank you. I've had a question from Jess Gardiner at the University of Cambridge Library. The welcome collection is local, national and international. How are the library's practices adapting to engage in meaningful ways, enabling exchange and change, online with communities unable to come in person? It's something that we have really had to think hard about in the last year. I suppose we were one of the few research libraries that had to close for a large part of 2020 and early 2021. And we've had to think about how we can provide, I suppose, service to people who would have come into the library otherwise. So I suppose we've used very kind of traditional ways of allowing us to kind of meet the needs of visitors to the collection. But one of the things which we've been doing as part of the research around library futures is to understand what other organisations have been doing in that time and how they've been maintaining relationships with the communities that they served. One thing that we have really noticed actually is a kind of uptake, I don't know if that's the right word, in the accessing of our collections internationally during periods of lockdown. We probably have to do a bit more analysis on how we kind of build those relationships, but we have seen that as a kind of positive outcome of the last year, but we're still thinking about how we can do more of that work. But also thinking about it, not just within the space of the library, per se, the physical space of the library, but across a range of different activities that we do, which mean that our collections can be more accessible. We did a number of things during lockdown, which looked at the ways in which we engage with our communities, so not specifically around the library, but looked, I suppose, holistically at particular areas of work across our different departments. So we did something called the Common Challenge, which was to really look at this central question of what it meant to be human now. And in the process of that, produced a podcast, commissioned new work, collected new work, co-commissioned new work, and that was the way of us, I guess, enabling a sort of continued conversation about the kinds of things we were trying to do. Thank you. We've had a comment from Cliff van Doort at the head of the National Archives Library saying he'd like to talk to you more about the journey that you are on and where you want to be, because it's the path he'd like to take. Paolo Marchione from GISC, is there always a risk of representing incomplete or partial experiences through collection management and interpretation activities, because they will always be mediated by individual, more or less conscious subjectivities? The short answer is yes. I'm not quite sure how to answer that question, I guess. I think what we're trying to achieve is a more complete picture. It's not saying that we have all the pieces of the jigsaw, and it will make this really coherent, cogent picture of what the world looks like. There will be gaps and there will be ruptures. The work that we're doing is trying to kind of move the idea of the museum on from this sort of cathedral of knowledge and power to one which is actually about helping individuals to kind of, I suppose, to understand their place in the world. That sounds a bit idealistic, doesn't it? I certainly know that I found that experience through being in museum and libraries, and if our coordinates of that space are always the coordinates that we've inherited from the sort of 18th and 19th century, and even the 20th century, then we have to plot new coordinates. And it's this kind of new map will not be like the old map, and therefore there will be gaps and there will be fissures. Personally, I find that exciting. I don't think the intention is to kind of build this complete picture. That might be me sidestepping again. And this is why I guess it feels like a lifetime's work. It feels like the work will never be done, but we have to be, and it's such a good question because I think we have to be cognizant of the fact that there will always be some sort of gap, particularly as we speak in this very demarcation area of the UK or the British Isles. Thank you. Question from Claire Blamie. Can you expand a bit more about what you mean by inclusive language? So again, another good question. I wish a colleague was here to help me with this. I guess on a very sort of fundamental level, it's thinking about the kinds of language, words, phrases that have been used previously which have been offensive. So you can kind of go on to our library catalog now, probably other library catalogs now, and look at the way the objects have been catalogued from another time that we use derogatory language, which will undermine the power of the object to tell the story about the community from which it came from. So part of the work that we have to do, and this is happening through the transcription project, is really to re-articulate what that object is by using carefully considered language. And that's just one way we're doing it. There are a number of things that we're doing when we think about inclusive language. We've just rewritten a statement about it and we welcome on our websites. And it's a big team effort across a number of different departments. We already do it, I guess, through what's happening on our website through Digital Editorial. But this is a kind of bigger, more, I guess, more, our reaching project to really kind of, if we're going to kind of achieve our mission around equity diversity inclusion, we have to kind of have this interrogation of the language that has been used historically. Thank you. And a fairly long question from Rachel Minuth. There are issues in the structures we have in place for cataloging narratives and subjects that are problematic and create problems for contemporary inclusive practice, thinking here about the example you gave on the Library of Congress catalogs. However, aside from these limited and problematic framing, there is also the issue of absences where elements of persons identity such as racism, ethnicity and gender are not recorded as assumptions are based on the dominant cultures present. What are your feelings about systematic recording of protected characteristics to give researchers with deeper frames of reference and to make visible those narratives that are minimized through these assumptions. Do you think there is a danger in this practice of objectifying subjects and anchoring their narrative slash research value to their identities. Thanks for your question, Rachel. I, yeah, it's a different another difficult question. It can't just be that we're looking at the kind of physical characteristics of a person's identity. That is the kind of limitations I guess of doing some being positioned now and casting ourselves back into the past. We don't have enough information to make a decision around an individual that that is that you're absolutely right there is a danger there. And we already have that I guess in different parts of certainly different parts of what's publicly presented in welcome collection and perhaps what's kind of more hidden within our catalog. I think there are kind of examples of of organizations that are attempting to do it well. There is, and I can't remember the name but there was an amazing exhibition, I think the year before last around the representation of black people in, in, in arts. And actually, one of the things that they attempt to do was understand the person in the painting through a kind of forensic exploration to kind of delve into multiple histories to do that work and this is I suppose something in slightly something in reverse or in parallel to what you're talking about. Rachel, but we're kind of starting from a position where where where individuals are presented or written about and we know nothing about them. And therefore they take on this kind of story to people of framing or a kind of caricature. But actually, there might be something that needs to be done to really hone down on an individual's role. It's something that David Olusoga Olusoga talks about a lot as well. I think we have to recognize the risks around doing that but also record but also think about what we might gain from from doing that work that has to be some balance. I don't think we can't, I don't think we can't not do the work, but those risks are really important to highlight. Thank you. And what I think is going to be probably the final question from Sean Woodward. As we think about developing 21st century libraries, archives and collections, do we need to develop different and new metrics to demonstrate our value to both funders and users, as we look at multiple modes of access and use. Can you repeat the question? What was the main thrust? It was about developing new metrics for funders. Do we need different ways of demonstrating our value? I pause on this because I always, I, I sort of, I've sort of struggled with this idea. I obviously have always a publicly funded organization, we were always having to kind of demonstrate our impact. And similarly at Welcome Collection we have to do that, we have to do that too. And I, I suppose part of me is, I struggle with this because I suppose, again, I kind of see the intrinsic value of, of libraries and reading rooms. So I'm, but I think there is a kind of vast body of research. And increasingly so, which talks about the kind of value of public libraries of collections open to the public. There's a really kind of distinct impact on the life of individuals and developing new metrics might probably be the wrong person to ask that question. I don't think we have to go too far to demonstrate our impact though. That might be quite a naive response. And obviously I'm talking from a place of somebody who has, who's utterly converted. I don't think we have to go too far to kind of to make a point about the impact that we have.