 I'm delighted to introduce three case studies today from Durham University, the University of Aberdeen, and the University of Southampton. They each showcase approaches to engaging with different audience groups to make collections more accessible and diverse and to develop inclusive practices and the reach of the collections. The first case study comes from Durham University Library. Ross Wilkinson, the Learning Engagement Manager, will take us through how the team has developed inclusivity, diversity and inclusion, particularly of faith and LGBTQ plus groups in their learning and engagement programmes, academic teaching and exhibitions. As an example of this, curator and graduate intern Ivy Hewitt will present how their academic studies have directly impacted on discussions of inclusivity in the upcoming 2025 exhibition. That's gay. So I'm delighted to hand over to Ross and Ivy. So hello, thank you, yes. I'm Ross Wilkinson, the Learning Engagement Manager and with me is Ivy. So we're going to start by just sort of talking through a little bit about what we've been doing. We're kind of at a midpoint, so this is quite interesting to look through and talk about the work we've been doing. I think there's so much amazing projects and practice happening and we're kind of finding this quite an organic initiative process, so we're going to share with you where we're at, what we're doing and how we're kind of working with various groups. So for those who don't know, up in Durham, the Learning Engagement Team and the Museum's College of Exhibitions Team and the Archives colleagues and libraries, we work across a range of departments. As we're at the Orange Museum, we have a policy library, the Archives Special Collection, the Museum of Archaeology. We have the Art Collection, which Ivy is part of. We have Durham Castle. We have the Bill Bryson Library. We have temporary online exhibitions. We have the University of Charlie Gardens, which isn't part of our department, but we do support. We also do various digital engagement as well and thrown in there, including the Archives Special Collection, our very historic libraries and things like that, but that's just a bit of an overview as to who we are and the collections we're working with. I'm going to start with where our journey began, which was, we're on kind of 15 years into our journey of looking at inclusion, how we work, and through various teams, we always say we might be the Learning Engagement Team, but we're not the only team that do engagement. All teams are responsible for various levels of engagement that they do, whether it be with their collections, whatever it is that they work with. And one of the things that we wanted to look at was within the area that we live, specifically County Durham, but also the northeast of England, was looking at who lives here, which communities live here, and who are represented within our collections and how can we create collaboratively as best as possible an engagement program, which brings in as many different groups as we can. So we work with lots of different school groups particularly, so that's quite a nice place to start because once the school kids are going on site and they're working with, we start making links with families. They might have links to other community settings, so that allows us to expand and kind of link ourselves with different groups living locally, but we also have the student body, which as a lot of you will work with as well, I want to kind of figure out ways we can engage. So we started off by simply looking at, particularly with faith, is how do we support people who are represented particularly at our Oriental Museum collections, how are these people represented and how do they want to be represented, and how do they want to have inclusion. It was interesting that actually from a lot of that work particularly, the main representation that people wanted in this area was just that people know that they're here and that if you want to come and learn more, come and do it in somewhere that is a safe, inclusive space where you can come and have fun. So on the core group started working with our fantastic Hindu community, who are absolutely wonderful, and as well as the student group we work with local groups as well, whether that be through volunteers who want to come in and help, or whether that be through university staff, or through students, or whether that be through a whole host of different groups. And together we've now celebrated our 10 years of Hindu festivals that we've been doing and they've been growing and growing and growing in kind of popularity, particularly coming up is Holy Festival, which is the big powder throw. And what I love about what the community were kind of saying to us is we need a venue, we need somewhere for food, and we need somewhere for people to come and have fun, but also learn about why this is significant and important. And from there we've actually grown that out to be working with our local Islamic groups for putting on our Eid festival, which is lovely. I know a lot of places already do these things, but for us we didn't, we didn't have that provision. So we want to look at how can we do this so it's inclusive of everyone. And that was quite interesting for us because it depends on which groups you talk to. Some really wanted to do like the big, the fun, the loud, and to have food. Other groups like no, no, actually we need to make this about the faith and we want to have a series of, it takes a little bit of negotiation to sort of say, okay, so how do you want to do this? So we want to have readings from the Quran, but we also want to have the food that people can enjoy, and for those who aren't of the Islamic faith to learn a little bit about it and what Eid actually means. So it's open to all and everybody. We've recently started as well on a slightly different provision is looking at our accessibility, working with various families of people living with visual impairments, and we do a lot of work with families with people living with autism. We've got our dementia friendly groups up and running, but vision impairment is the next element that we want to start working with in a bit more detail, mainly because museums aren't accessible, our spaces aren't accessible for people with visual impairments as they currently stand. So how can we get collections out? We've run a few workshops where we've worked with people over the years, but we really want to actually get down to the core of how we develop this and build it. So we feel like over the last 10 years or more, we've begun to become inclusive of faith. We're now looking at, and we've worked with various communities, we're now looking at our vision impaired community, and then that's also brought us on, okay, so which other communities are we not working with and brought us to the LGBTQ bus community. So we were actually approached by a teacher in the first instance who wanted to do this and to give freedom for the group to pick, and this was a sixth form group, to pick LGBTQ stories in our collections that were there. We hadn't really done a lot of exploration into this, we'd done various tours for pride events and we'd put on various workshops, but never done anything where we'd kind of handed over freedom, and that was really interesting because the stories that the children, well if they children they were pupils, they were sort of 16 to 17 year olds, that they picked out were faster, and here's two core ones that they really enjoyed. So they went either down contemporary to the Dariah film, a film postcard that we have, a film from 1996, which does, has a very interesting take on kind of what we would call trans, however it's not necessarily perceived that within the culture that it's coming from and that promoted quite a lot of discussion and debate within the group, and we spoke to the teacher, okay what do you actually want out of this, and what the teacher wanted was a safe space where people could express opinions and questions because not everyone understands, or those who do understand and have experienced this, they want to be able to share, and just to say you know with respect and mutual respect what is your experience, and we used kind of the collections that had specific like these films, okay so what is within the context of this film coming from 1996, coming from South Asia, what context we're looking at and how do we discuss this, and what language can we use, and what was lovely as one of the students it was actually there, they knew the film because their parents liked the film, and they were able to share their experience and how they found it which was absolutely fantastic because I hadn't seen the film until this point, so then we went and watched it and that was quite nice. The other story is looking at historical representations and one that the children found, he's saying to the young adult whatever you want to call them, found it fascinating that in ancient cultures how things were perceived, and they were obsessed with this thing in the middle here which is our lettuce, our Egyptian lettuce, which was a symbol of male virility, but where it becomes interesting is this comes from a story between the god Horus who was depicted here as a child on one of our items and it's often depicted in you've got a stellar of day do here who's a lettuce is part of his offerings for his funerary procession, and that lettuce doesn't matter who it was represented we found that often if it was given to a fair role because the story and you can go research Horus and sets lettuce and there's a whole mythology there, and that lettuce is seen as that male virility and they were obsessed with okay but there's female pharaohs, so how did the ancient world and the ancient Egyptians perceive gender when it comes to power, authority and what was more important the deities are not and we had a really interesting discussion around that. I can go into more of this in the Q&A but I want to get on to Ivy because where Ivy comes in is we also as part of our learning engagement programmes across the various teams we run various academic modules within archaeology and visual arts Ivy who was one of our students we thought let's experiment with this and we'll take it that little bit further and see where our students can take this and it's wonderful to say that as this has gone on Ivy is now not a student but a graduated colleague which is lovely so on that note I will hand over to Ivy to kind of explore where we then took it within a student body to discuss these ideas and where we're going to take the project further. Well hello everyone thank you Russ so as I said my name is Ivy I'm the current graduate intern for the art collection here at Durham University. I graduated last summer in touch with 23 from Durham with the BA in visual arts and film after being taught by Russ and then there's a curatorial team across the collections here at the university and now I am the graduate intern working alongside all those who have taught me but just quite an honour. So for the case study my exhibition which is called That's Gay which is being held from May to September next year 2025 at the Oriental Museum here in Durham that's what today I'm going to be working at. So the project started two years ago now in the second year of my undergrad and I was set an assignment to write a 5000 word mock grant application for an exhibition that was completely of my own making. We were given complete and utter creative freedom and the only caveat was that if we wanted the Mona Lisa or if we wanted to have an exhibition held at the Met or Tate or MoMA we would have to factor that into our time constraints and our budget which we would then fake for ourselves and having that complete trust and at that point as individuals who only had his aspirations looking towards working in the sector and with no professional experience being students having that the ability to focus purely on the audiences that we were going to be catering for with absolutely no limitations having that ability certainly shaped the way well that I approach projects and audiences and how I hope to approach audiences and projects but with the rest of my career and that was how that's getting a celebration of queer pride through art was born. I came up with the idea for an exhibition that was completely by and for and of queer people and the expression follows three central strands if you will visibility representation and celebration and a couple of weeks after I handed in my assignment with no ambition further than just writing an assignment that I truly adored writing. I adored my entire degree I'm a total and always will be an absolute teacher's pet that Ross knows. I received an email following my submission asking if my assignment could be passed on to Alex Culling of the Swinburn who is our curator for contemporary art and one of the other curatorial members who taught me my degree here at Durham and following that Alex asked me if I would like to realise my idea and obviously I said yes well after a few other exclamations but yes and that offer was completely separate to my current role as graduate intern. I had no idea that I would be applying for the graduate internship and I didn't even know this was the same when I got that email and jumping to now we're in the early stages of my career and the exhibition nicely coming into one. I'm currently working up a list of works and a list of artists so the exhibition will feature well-known queer artists and less than known queer artists and works submitted by members of the queer community through an open call and they will be shown side by side completely in solidarity with with one another allowing the audience to view queer people and their art and members of the community completely and utterly embedded into one and that really gives well that really will give the audience and it will make them involved and really have that ownership over the exhibition which is of and by and for them and I have a community that advocates for diversity and inclusion the range of works that will be involved in that space will completely mirror this so all kinds of mediums from photography to sculpture to oil paintings everything will be will be featured and covered in this exhibition and that really solidifies how diversity and inclusion is at the heart of every single aspect of this project not just in the artists and the art that's represented in the end product but in the very fabric of the exhibition itself and the communities that are going to be worked through with and through along the life and legacy of the exhibition and to do this boldly and pridefully and and I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here but as a community where people have reclaimed so much of the hurtful language and this previously is still used to oppress individuals and as part of that reclaiming process the very name of the exhibition is an accusatory statement yes that's gay yes these artists are gay this art is gay and that should be celebrated and celebrated with pride um say to to kind of pop this as I wear i'm preaching my time um two years ago I I decided to dedicate my career or my life really to this to these audiences and although I don't think it's particularly necessary or even fair to sit here and call upon individuals to dedicate their lives um I do think it that the sector must be dedicated through these lives to the lives of these audiences um and I hope that that's something that we all can can work towards. I know that I will be hopefully the next 50 audience. Thank you, we'll see now why Ivy's submission came across so well two years ago. Thank you so much I'll stop sharing. Thank you very much um Ross and Ivy it's so fantastic to hear people speak with such passion um about their careers and about their sort of future direction um for our second presentation um this morning is is coming from the University of Aberdeen um which fosters inclusive learning environments through accessible resources and services we have Sarah Todd joining us who is the library inclusive coordinator um and we'll share a case study highlighting the obstacles encountered by a student with a visual impairment and the library's role in addressing these challenges so I'll hand over to you Sarah. So let's get started my name is Sarah Todd I work at the subject inquiry team at the University of Aberdeen. I work in the Sir Duncan Rice Library which is the main campus library the largest one and I am the library inclusion coordinator. I wanted to touch quickly before I get started on why I chose the title that I did the foundational purpose of our university is there on screen um this is something that really speaks to me and I think it's nice to reflect on this. So this is a summary of what I'm going to cover I'm going to share a little bit of information about disabled students some info about our uni some of the challenges in this case study we're going to think about what visual impairment actually means and the practical ways that our library was able to address some of these and then we're going to finish off on some of our other initiatives for inclusion. So here's a wee summary of an overview of issues for disabled students they obviously face a lot of extra difficulty than your average student um yeah they might be quite far away from their home support system their social system especially if they come to Aberdeen being right up in the northeast of Scotland. Disabled students UK has sector targets for 2033 these are quite way off but there's a lot ways that we can help and they recommend six key ways to improve things those are using universal design for learning creating an inclusive culture creating a barrier free path to support implementing sufficient adjustments giving students someone to turn to and creating equal opportunities for all students. Next up we've got some info about our university here so the terminology that we use for the reasonable adjustments at University of Aberdeen is inclusion adjustments or individual student adjustments we have a lot of support services available here for our students so where do we fit in this we have four possible inclusion adjustments for students these include priority status this is enhanced support with book loans we do affection carry service for library users we do one-to-one meetings for support and training for our users and lastly we provide accessible materials we work really closely with other support services and attend monthly roundtables to share info we send referrals to other areas with consent and we advocate for our students so here is a bit of info about the student who is the subject of our case study they joined us from another continent and begun a PGT course they were not eligible for DSA funding as they are non-resident so that's obviously a pretty big barrier they have a visual impairment and the way that they like to read is by magnifying and so the subject of my talk is going to focus on how we provided learning materials to them and so the student obviously had a lot of challenges in coming here they were separated from every kind of thing they already knew they were separated from their family and their usual social support systems they had to grapple with a completely new educational system completely different terminology and a whole different structure so when the student arrived I met face-to-face with them to see how we can help I feel it's important not to make assumptions about someone based on their disability so we discussed how the student likes to read they like to zoom in on things they've tried read aloud kind of functions but they find the weird robot voice very distracting and just not very useful so I spoke with the student's main tutor to get a list of key resources that we're needed for teaching and this is the focus of my talk today so let's consider what visual impairment actually means so the R&IB tells us that vision is made up of two parts so this is acuity that's the middle part of your vision that you can focus and you also have the field this is the peripheral part of your vision at the sides I think it's quite an interesting thing to do for people who have no visual impairment to try reading using only your peripheral vision this is extremely tiring very demanding physically but also mentally so it can be very difficult for students to engage with materials that they need so when it comes to our library how do we make our collections or modern collections accessible our libraries have a digital first policy but licenses are not uniformly available for every book and journal sometimes licenses are prohibitively expensive if they're even available tall a lot of you will already know that if you work in academic libraries it's extremely complicated also to note that the accessibility of electronic materials is quite variable electronic does not automatically mean more accessible the materials themselves may be quite restrictive maybe users can only read from a screen they can't download individual chapters or the full text to use with their software or sometimes the files are restricted to certain types of software to open files and the files might expire after a short time so what we can do in order to provide accessible materials is use section 31b of cdpa and this provides an exemption for disabled people where authorised bodies like us librarians can request or create accessible copies for our users these are only made for the individual use on a personal basis for the student and we ask our users to not share or distribute these items so let's take you through the process of us sourcing these accessible items our first step is to look at an amazing service which is run by the Royal National Institute for the Blind this is a free service and it's called Bookshare it's an absolutely massive database of almost two million accessible books and it covers a huge range of subjects we can create accounts for any student or staff member who's eligible and you can see there on screen that the membership criteria is really quite broad after we create accounts we train our users on how to use the database itself and we provide training on using dolphin easy reader this is the reading software recommended by the RNIB easy reader makes it simple to customise the format so users can adjust the font spacing alignment colour and contrast to customise a display that works well for them also at the bottom of the screen you can see there the request page we can submit requests to Bookshare to ask if they can request new materials for us this is amazing it saves us so much time it is so useful so we submitted some requests on the behalf of the student some of them were successful and some of them were not so where do we go from here what's our next step next up we use search box to retrieve the publisher details it's an up-to-date directory of all publisher contact details it massively cuts down the legwork of hunting for the contact info for each publisher i don't know if you've ever tried to find a contact button on a publisher website it can be a nightmare so all we have to do is search for the details send emails directly to publishers and request specific texts so this is what we did in this case and we discovered that it was really quite difficult to find the text that were needed for this student a lot of the publications were from smaller publishers or obsolete publishers or the texts were older so published like pre 2000 which means that publishers just don't have the files so we could give up there and say no we can't do it we're not going to do that what did we do next next thing we do is we scan the books so you can see this is the original image taken from a book scan do you think this is accessible i mean it's more easily magnified than a print book but it's still quite difficult to read when you zoom in because of the quality of the scan we higher pixel resolution is obviously much better but this results in really huge file sizes which just doesn't work especially when you're scanning excerpts there are longer than a few pages the images need to be compressed because basically your computer can't cope with the size of them which causes a loss of resolution and makes the text appear choppy as you can see it on screen also the text here is just a photo of a page so it's not machine readable any assistive software won't be able to read it aloud and you can't really change any of the formatting without specialised software so for visually impaired readers i generally supply text in both pdf so the original image file and doc format the doc format is used with microsoft word so this is so that the reader can customize the formatting themselves it's possible to do this in words so you can change the font the sizing the spacing colors contrast all sorts and use the accessibility features built into word for this student because they they read primarily by magnifying and zooming in i wanted to focus on making the clarity of the scan better so i'm going to take you through how i did that so here is the program that i used to increase accessibility i absolutely love abbey fine reader they're not paying me i get no benefit out of plugging this i just think it's a really great program that is easy to use i know it's weird to have a favourite pdf editor but you know um so this is quite a new skill for me but i find the software quite intuitive and easy to use and it wasn't too hard to pick up the product specialists at abbey are fantastic and there's lots of great how-tos and videos the program automatically enhances and smooth scans meaning that you don't have to fiddle about with lots of bizarre settings to do that yourself so when you're taking a scan what you need to do is scan it with optical character recognition this is where the program detects the text that it sees on the screen so there can be a lot factors that affect how well ocr works this includes things like the physical condition of the book any folds or marking or damage or just the age of the book the quality of the original scan you saw before it was very choppy that can affect things and special characters can also affect the accuracy you can see here that there are some highlighted sections on the screen this is where fine reader isn't sure what the characters are so it shows you the original scan on one side of your screen and it shows you what it has automatically recognised on the other and then you can go through and verify any areas of text that it's not sure about this particular document contains a lot of translated text and a lot of the special characters just didn't work properly the process of verifying the ocr can be very time consuming i'm not going to lie but it's quite important to do this especially for visually impaired users or translated text as it really affects the readability of the final file so i did that what let's have a look at the result and so here we have the finished text in pdf you can see here that it's still quite choppy it's because it was quite a long excerpt that i had to scan and my computer just wasn't able to cope with it so that's the pdf version and now i will show you what the doc version came out as you can see here that the characters are a lot smoother it's going to be a lot easier to see when you're zooming in and our user could potentially change any sections to match their preferred format so that was what we did to make sure that we were able to provide materials to this student next up i'm going to talk about some of our initiatives for inclusion so um we undertook a big redevelopment of our library spaces this is following student feedback um we decided to redevelop an entire floor we have seven floors in our library in our largest library and we redevelop floor two to be a dedicated group work in social learning space we also did the same in the medical library on the lower ground floor and work is underway at the moment in redeveloping our law library we also previously in this the Duncan rice library we didn't have any space for creating displays for books so that was something that we were quite excited about being librarians so we now have this very attractive nice bendy shelving you can see there and our inclusive collections group plans displays around different awareness days throughout the year on different themes some other things we do are we ask our community for acquisition suggestions to help us add more diverse viewpoints to our collection so we ask for recommendations through a web form around edi themes we have a small ring fence budget and we run this two times per year so this year we chose disability history month and international day of women and girls in science in conjunction with international women's day we've had a whole lot of suggestions so far and we still have a few weeks to go it's really excellent to see people engaging with us in this way with our reading list service we also have a special tag that academic staff can apply within leganto reading list software this tag denotes text that should be bought to support decolonisation of our university so adding this tag submits a purchase request at us and so far this academic year we have purchased 62 new items under this tag this constitutes 10% of all the teaching material purchases this academic year so that's also a really positive step another thing that you can see here on screen is this is just the beginning of our creativity and wellbeing collection so these items that you can see here were very kindly donated by university staff to us but we were also awarded a development trust student experience grant to fund a lot of supplies so the aim of this collection is to help students foster a sense of belonging to the university to the city help students connect with each other in a way that's not connected to their work and just help students promote better mental health and increased focus next up you can see here that here's some photos of our theropet dogs we host weekly visits to all of our libraries and these are super duper popular these happen in our main and medical libraries and have just started in our law library the image there on the left is our most liked image ever on social media and you can see why this is Nevis she is a flatcode retriever and she's just a bundle of joy on the right we have Nelson he's a very good boy and he's just a gorgeous rough colleague we also hold regular meetings with the student experience engagement and wellbeing team and the students union these meetings are an excellent way for us to share ideas and plan for hosting activities to promote wellbeing in our libraries we've hosted breathing sessions yoga sessions and we also host a dedicated wellbeing lounge during assessment periods for our students we have a lot more groups in the works we have a puzzle group coming up a gaming group and crafting groups are upcoming that's going to be held this wednesday our first one and the last slide here shows our public library branch this is on the ground floor of our Sir Duncan rice library this is run by Aberdeen city council and it helps us just connect with the wider community around us not just within our university so they have a separate collection which complements our academic one and the aim is to promote reading for pleasure the city library staff have just started running bookbug sessions here these are story and song sessions for young children and it's just a way to get lots of little people in our library which is lovely you can see here on screen here some of the resources that I have cited in the course of this presentation and that's me finished thank you so much for your time please get in touch with me if you'd like to discuss anything thank you very much sir thank you and great friend on a on a very cute picture of a dog oh sorry that's my own dog he's not a therapist just a quick reminder to everyone if you do have any questions please submit them through the q&a button at the bottom of the screen and in the final case study entitled heart stopper sustaining the library lgbtq love affair david right associate library director for user experience at the university of south hampton will consider why libraries continue to matter to queer people and will share some ideas on how we can continue to diversify our collections and ensure positive engagement with our lgbtq plus customers so i'll hand over to david good morning everyone david right here from the university of south hampton i'm the associate director for user experience so my team are responsible for the four libraries that make up the university of south hampton library service here and what i wanted to talk about today was the work that we've been doing particularly to support our lgbtq community in the library as well it's an appropriate time i think for us to be looking at this we're coming to the end of lgbt history month in the uk at the moment that runs throughout febru and i know that libraries across the uk in the academic sector in the public sector a lot of libraries will have been celebrating lgbt history month it's a great opportunity to share our collections with our users and i wanted really to start by saying a couple of things there are things that i will touch on in my presentation that you've heard in other colleagues presentations prior to this as well i don't think we do anything particularly special here at south hampton but i think as well it is quite good just to remind ourselves why it matters that we actually do do some of these things and because of history month i really want to set the context of supporting our lgbtq communities a little bit more in the in the course of the next 20 minutes i wanted to kind of hopefully remind you about why libraries matter to queer people to lgbtq people and share some ideas about how we can continue to diversify our collections and to make sure that we've got an ongoing and positive engagement with our lgbtq users as well i'll just say a note about language and a previous speaker i noticed picked up on this as well i tend to use the words lgbtq and queer interchangeably now i think we're said earlier a lot of young people particularly in the community are starting to reclaim that word queer it can feel quite uncomfortable i think to particularly people older people in the lgbtq community it was very much seen as a slur when when we were perhaps younger people but curiously enough what became a slur for younger people was the word gay and again you've seen that in the previous presentation in that that word of that so gay that phrase that that became quite offensive to them and they've found some empowerment in in owning that word queer again so as i say i'll kind of use the words interchangeably really as i go through this session today i don't know how many of you saw the the drama series that channel four ran over the last couple of years called heart stopper and it was a very i think very touching a very positive story of a group of young people going through their secondary school experience together and finding their own identities in terms of sexuality and gender identity as well i was particularly moved by the very last scene in the season two finale and i'm sorry if i'm giving any spoilers away here to anybody who hasn't seen the series yet but the character you see on screen here Isaac was involved by the school library in setting up a book display for our pride month in june and one of the books that was actually featured in the display is called ace and and one of the scenes shows Isaac going into the library on his own one evening and actually borrowing this book which is about asexuality and Isaac himself as a quiet man he's been reading a lot through the series and he's struggling again to come to terms with his own sexuality trying to figure out exactly what that is and the suggestion in the way that this is actually depicted in the series is that the book actually helps him to start to understand his own feelings and his own sense of his sexuality and as somebody who's worked in libraries for 30 years myself i've found this a really moving scene within there and a real reminder of the role that we can play books featured all the way through the the series of heart stopper at the author herself i think obviously is a huge reader and a fan of libraries as well and it actually read to some of them it led to some of the more die hard fans of the series picking up the books that the characters were actually reading across the series and then a whole whole series of book lists appeared that were actually picking up on the books that had been depicted in the series and they've been chosen very very carefully they reflected not only lgbtq culture but they were picking up on things like women's identity one of the characters of thing at some point was reading albu kamuz book the outsider so again just picking up that on that sense of being a little bit different and i think again for me it was terrific to see such a positive representation of reading and libraries in a series that was so very clearly attracting a very young audience or a teenage audience in there in following it really as well and getting behind it there's nothing new really to libraries being seen as a safe space for lgbtq people and the author Jeanette Winterson published her first book back in the 1980s called oranges are not the only fruit talked about her own childhood where she was brought up she was adopted and it was a fictional depiction of the childhood where there was a lot of tension between the religious upbringing that she was having and again her own sense of herself and again her sexual identity and she's talked a lot about the importance of libraries to her as she was growing up i think if you look at interviews with any lgbtq writer there will be some point at which they will actually talk about why libraries have actually mattered to them and this book that i'm mentioning on the screen here why be happy when you could be normal is a lovely counterpoint to oranges are not the only fruit oranges was a fictionalised account of Jeanette Winterson's young her childhood and her teenage years why be happy was actually her looking at this from a nonfiction angle and starting to actually analyse her own journey across that period and through life as well with a sexuality and a sense of identity i also can bring something of a personal perspective to this as well i'm a gay man i was coming to terms with my own sexuality as a teenager at the end of the 1970s and it wasn't a positive place for a young gay man to be trying to establish his identity at the time i was growing up in Newcastle the gender roles were very very fixed men were you know expected to behave in a very particular way and if you didn't do that you really had that sense of feeling other than and feeling like an outsider really and what i actually discovered was that the library again was a place of sanctity for me and i borrowed this book when i was 14 years old from the library the city centre library in Newcastle a book called a lasting relationship homosexuals and society it's a very academic book and one of the early ones that was being produced at that time there wasn't a huge amount that was being written back then around the lgbtq community but i can remember being absolutely terrified taking it to the desk we didn't have to self-check out in those days i had to have it stamped out by somebody who was actually at the desk at the entrance to the library and i was my heart was racing when i took this to issue it and the librarian took it off me stamped the book and never batted an eyelid and i just think that was a kind of pivotal moment for me in how i regarded librarians and libraries they weren't judgmental nobody was asking me why i was borrowing this book nobody was telling me that i shouldn't be borrowing this book there was just an acceptance that actually access to information was important for young people and therefore i should actually be able to see this and read it for myself i think that's particularly important again i'm incredibly sad to find that in 2023 we're having to kind of restate the role of libraries and i think in many ways libraries are probably more under attack that in 2023 than they were really looking back at any of the period that i've been involved in the sector we obviously had in the uk section 28 in the 1980s that made things difficult for public authorities in terms of that odd phrase that was used at the time around promoting homosexuality but what we're seeing now is a lot of challenges to the stock that we're holding and particularly again in the us i think this is focused quite a lot on lgbtq titles you can see from this article that appeared in the guardian last year that a book by juno dorson called this book is gay which again is is aimed at teenagers was among the book books that was most targeted in the usa for removal from library collections so how do we actually respond to this as libraries here at south hampton we're in the course at the moment very big collections reassessment we're shrinking our print collection at the main heartly library here because again we've seen some of the print use falling over the years but what we've done in terms of the approach to this project to reshape that collection is used as an opportunity again to restate our commitment to intellectual freedom so again we have a very clear statement that sets out what it is that we are intending to do as a library that we're not here as sensors we're drawing on those statements that are made by respected library bodies gifflers on there oral uk themselves their statement on intellectual freedom as well and again i think my first kind of tip to you would be to make sure that you actually have a statement ready for this in terms of how the library actually approaches inclusivity across its collections because it feels to me as though libraries are suddenly a good opportunity by some journalists to actually create some stories that can start to provoke a little bit of controversy i hesitate to use the word clickbait but you know it is something that is a particular line so when we were starting to work on our collection here in south hampton for instance the local press weren't coming along to say it's really interesting that the library is modernising its collection here now what they wanted to know was why are you throwing books away so i think there is a slightly hostile atmosphere out there at the moment and it's important i think as libraries that we are ready to be able to actually respond to that and work with our colleagues elsewhere in the university around our cons to make sure that we're ready to just pick up on that as well another thing that i know has come through to us and you may well have had it in your own libraries is being asked whether we're putting trigger warnings in our catalogue records as well seems to be a freedom of information request that comes through fairly regularly for us now as well so it's a very interesting environment i think that we're moving into and i think for me it just re-emphasises the need for libraries to continue to be a place that welcomes not just people from the LGBTQ community but people from all minorities really who you know find themselves perhaps feeling othered feeling excluded from other areas of society as well the library can actually continue to be a place where they see themselves reflected and they see their cultures reflected and they can learn more about their either about themselves or about the backgrounds and the environments that they're operating in again we've seen previous speakers talking about the importance of all involving users in shaping your collections again universities are great places to actually connect to different groups we have a an LGBTQ staff and student network here at Southampton so we work very closely with them to try and establish connections to make sure that they can make recommendations for titles to include in our stock here as well and again i know there will be other libraries who probably are much more active or see academics who are much more active in this field but there will be academics who have an interest in queer studies as well and can they actually help us to make sure that the community is actually reflected in the books that we have within our collections here as well we have a web page that makes it very easy for students and staff to actually identify titles that might be particularly relevant to their areas so this is our diversity inclusion and belonging page that just then allows students to have a jumping off point into different areas of the collection so our trans titles would be featured there the bisexual titles the things that are dealing with women's history and so on can all be accessed from this one page it's important as well to remember that you can draw on your own library staff when i was researching this talk i noticed that the university of London the senate house library staff have actually made some recommendations themselves and i know from my personal experience there are a lot of lgbtq people working in libraries again it's always felt like a very welcoming and accepting place for me as an employee as well and so you know why not tap into some of that knowledge and experience as well and i invite your staff to do that you often see it in bookshops waterstones will have you know a little tag against a book that's been recommended by one of their booksellers so you know it's something else we can perhaps bring into our library collections in order to highlight that diversity that we have language as i said at the beginning of this talk is something that's very important and making sure that we're actually getting the right language and that we're keeping up to date with the way that language changes and evolves i think is a as a crucial part of our role here as libraries so it's not just about what's in our collections it's also how we're describing those as well we work again very closely with our central equality diversity and inclusivity team in the university they have produced an introduction to inclusive language and this is a shared resource again as well it's not something that is produced by one person who you know has done a survey of of where language is at this is one that is actually drawing on the lived experience of people who are in different communities whether that's lgbtq whether it's neurodiverse communities perhaps as well and actually feeding in some of the terminology that they're using here that means we can then actually draw on this when we're starting to describe some of the items that we have in our collections there are more resources becoming available on the internet as well that can actually support this so you may be aware of the wonderfully named homosaurus which is an international collective project that is bringing together some lgbtq specific vocabulary which is you know again being run by librarians from across the world who want to try try and make sure that some of the the main sources that we use the library of congress subject headings for instance can be supplemented by some of these additional terms that might not yet have made their way into these very formal and very structured hierarchies that we have in in place that we use to describe the material in the collections excuse me there's also a queer metadata collective group who are actually again looking at how we describe items in our collections that reflect lgbtq experience and what we can actually do to make sure first of all that they're discoverable in terms of students coming in with a different perception of the language that they're using perhaps to previous generations as well but also making sure that we're not actually going to be causing offence by terms that we actually have within our catalogues as well one of my previous speakers one of our previous speakers touched on that celebration of events and awareness days now when it comes to the lgbtq community you have a wealth of days to actually celebrate across the year it can be a little bit overwhelming i'll find even as a queer person myself now there seems to be something coming up in almost every month now that is looking at some different aspect of the lgbtq community so again if that's a tricky one to do then why not focus perhaps on some of the the less visible areas of that community as well by visibility day comes up in september there's still a lot of misunderstanding i think around bisexuality and again by bisexual people can quite often find themselves subjected to discrimination from two angles they're not really part of the heterosexual community but actually the gay community traditionally quite often has seen them as rather suspect and you know there is that perception that sometimes somebody who is bi is actually just on a journey and will eventually become gay it's you know not something really that i think we would want to see in 2023 so there's still a lot of learning to do around that and bisexuality i think is an identity that a lot of younger people now are starting to explore and it resonates with them and again ace week comes up in october that's asexuality starts you know it takes us back to the start of this discussion with our character from from heart stopper and these are some of the areas of the lgbtq community that perhaps are less familiar to our staff to our students and maybe something that we can help to throw some light on as well by highlighting some of the resources that are around in these particular areas this one's being very slow to load if you have the capacity to present some sessions yourself you can also you know organise some events that tie in with these awareness months i did sorry about that those two two slides have moved on very very quickly i hosted an event for lgbtq history month that focused on lgbtq mental health this month there is a theme to lgbtq history month this year that looks at health and medicine so we brought in the author of the queer mental health workbook to do an online session in conversation with us and last night the university held the 12th or 13th 12th i think stone wall annual stone wall lecture which again is looking at a queer perspective on history and again just making sure that we've actually got the stock you know the books that are actually written by the authors who are actually coming in here as well to talk to us is another way we can make sure that we're actually allowing people then to explore the ideas they're hearing in these sessions and follow up through the library as well there are lots of resources and communities for librarians around this as well i've just highlighted a couple of things that i've picked up here at sylip the library network has an lgbtq plus network for librarians as well sylip in scotland produces some resources for libraries and librarians around lgbtq plus resources and again leeds university here have an lgbtq archives project underway as well so there's a lot of things that we can plug into we don't have to be reinventing the wheel as we start to try and make sure that we're diversifying our collections and making them available and visible to our users as well so i hope i've kind of shared some of the thoughts some of the things that we've started to do here at st hampton why it actually matters that we're still reaching out to our lgbtq communities how that community is changing constantly really with each new generation that's coming into our universities as well and i hope that this helps you to you know look at making your libraries welcoming places for the generation of heart stopper teenagers who will be our students in a few years time as well this is the lovely cast getting together i thought it rather looked as though they kind of had their a level certificates here so you know these are the people who will be joining the university in the next few years and as i say i hope we're going to be in a good place to welcome them thank you many thanks to that david i'm sure that that would be a sentiment echoed by many many other here about their libraries as well and we've now got the opportunity to ask the speakers questions and so if i could ask sarah ross and ivy to come back to the screen and a reminder if you do have any questions um please go ahead and submit them in the q&a and we've got about 25 minutes um so the first question um well firstly a bit of feedback saying great presentations and fab projects but also asking a bit more about um how your audience prioritisation fits with the university's wider public engagement strategy and how much of the engagement work you do is shaped by higher up policy and direction um so if i could go to um ross and ivy first yeah thanks very much um i think from a policy perspective uh Durham's really starting to shift quite happily i mean we're very lucky that we have a very well funded learning engagement team um and we have various museums that we can do different things so particularly now i think there was a big trend for let's work with schools and get school groups in and now it's looking more broadly at wider audiences and things that we've been doing is trying to just work with collections and are being recognised as things that should just be being done and i think i wonder if a lot of people are finding that within their own institutions that there's been good practice happening and it's now being recognised strategically and therefore is getting more funding and more impetus so i feel like that's really lovely so i think towards particularly civic university strands and exploring what just widening participation means not just schools it's communities it's broader it's bringing everyone in and what i am loving is the work that we've done with particularly younger audiences like primary school under fives it was lovely to hear sarah saying that they have under fives i was it i think that that's often been seen as well it's too early that they're actually they're a really important audience and they're really valuable and they should be brought into things and and given that space and it's lovely that that's also being represented so yeah sorry i don't know anyone else i'd be thank you um sarah i wonder if you've got anything you'd like to add yeah um so our strategy for the university for the next years is Aberdeen 2040 and it has four strands and one of those is inclusion work so i think a lot of our departments all across the university have really taken that as a let's get going so um there's a lot of grassroots kind of work going on with the staff in our library we all have our own little passion projects and it's work that is really enjoyable and really worthwhile so um it's great to see that recognised you know across the wider sector thank you sarah and david yes curiously enough we've been focusing this week on setting out the library objectives that align with the university's objectives there is a the way that we work here as a document shared that actually sets out what the university as a whole is trying to achieve and is then cascaded so that we can each feed into that to say what it is that we are doing that is going to contribute to that overall aim and the first one i'm delighted to say is around improving diversity inclusion and equality for students as well and so it's at the top i would say of the university's agenda we've seen investment in our central equality diversity and inclusivity team over the last two years which is very very welcome and we appointed for the first time last year a vice chancellor with the specific remit around equality diversity and social inclusion and i think again that sends a really strong message to the university when you see somebody who is working in that very senior management team that has that specific belief to really start making some change across the university as well so yes a lot going on here in Southampton thank you and the next question we have which again i think is for everybody is do the speakers have recommendations for approaches which have worked well in reaching out and encouraging contact and responses from communities and i'll go again to Ross and Ivy first i hope that's okay because there is another kind of related question which you might answer at the same time which asks for the exhibition are you working with LGBT organisations and societies in Durham really thank you very much yeah so obviously engagement with communities can be quite tricky i mean if i take faith first and kind of work because that was kind of the first groups we started working with it's tricky because people have their own lives and that's the first thing we have to kind of respect you know if you're working with particular community outside the university group um they're giving up their time they have families they have jobs they've got all that sort of stuff going on so we found that we either approach through existing community groups like community centres um or we go to places of worship i think with the LGBTQ we're going down different avenues um so i'll let Ivy talk a little bit more specifically but in terms of when we started schools again have been quite an interesting place in a couple of weeks time we're having a consultation group with our teacher advisory group that we have set up with Durham County council where we're going to talk see how schools are engaging with this if they want to be involved and kind of letting them come forward if they wish to and then obviously student groups we can approach and on the whole actually they bite your hand off because we can go we've got a museum you can do this in and they're like great yeah let's do it that sounds fun but then it is managing expectation with the student groups can often be the thing because you know as you'll know that what they want to do lots and we all have wide responsibilities and things but i'd say with the community groups we find that we either approach through existing relationships and that has taken years to do because the problem with a lot of it is trust and they have to trust where you're coming from and why you're doing this are you doing this for them or you're doing it as a tick box exercise and if they as soon as they think that you're doing it for a tick box exercise they're out they don't want to do it it's got to be meaningful and it's got to be kind of with their their their aims apart one example that i kind of get that we really learned from was we did an exhibition opening where someone outside the university but made this and it was all doing the south and south east asian community and someone just bladed out i had no idea pakistan and india were the same country and a member of the communities looked to me and said well this is exactly why we need to do these kinds of projects and we thought right okay so where they're coming from is acceptance understanding and learning so that's kind of how we approach it and just being quite open and honest is the other thing when we start talking to groups anyway i don't know if you want to add anything i'd be about that scale specifically i'm just to kind of reinforce me as a speaking of the past student a recent past student um student groups always want to be involved especially when when particularly with the student groups um that are talking about their own identities we we want to chat about this that's why we're in this groups to begin with um so especially when we're university institutions and we have such easy access to um the wealth of lived experience right there on our doorsteps um there are people there are people that are so eager and enthusiastic that means that we're approaching every single student group um and uh and then wider obviously with the their own collegiate system we can approach every college um but that's quite um that's quite difficult to us um but then also the the wider community i think Durham um again bridging that level of trust with with local um non-academic community groups um or organisations so working with a few uh queer charities um uh that that work with local people um and trying to foster those relationships in a really um real and organic way um i think that's what we're focusing on um and not not pressuring our people to kind of come to the university it's kind of we are putting on an exhibition for these people of these people um so we have to really approach that with grace and and really delicately um privately but um we can't just sit here in our little curatorial offices or libraries that i think is going to talk about you um having that um again that that really sense of autonomy i think is so important for the community groups within what we're doing together. Thank you both very much um Sarah um one way that has worked amazingly well for us is just developing organic networks we do a lot of networking a lot of our staff um do various groups across the university and are also involved in the wider community so um when we do this networking we quite often make connections with people and they ask us questions and that will spark something out i think that organic ness um is really important and that flexibility it's we we've also had um groups of school kids come in and things like that and i think it's great to connect with people in a friendly in human way because we obviously are right in the weeds of our very specific areas and it's important to be able to communicate that in a way that is accessible to people and doesn't put them off like where some academics sitting in our ivory towers you know so i think the the human touch works amazingly well for us. Thank you and David um i liked what Ross said at the beginning sorry my voice is going the end of the week i've been talking a lot obviously um i like what Ross said at the beginning of the session actually which is that engagement is not just about somebody's job title i think everybody in the library really has the opportunity to engage and we've certainly tapped into connections that people have in different areas both within the university and beyond the university as well and i think the personal touch is quite an important one in some of these areas because um you know there are sensitivities around some of this that perhaps again um you know an email a general email is is not really going to plug into that it can be about kind of developing confidence with people as well certainly as i say when it comes to sensitive areas like sexuality and gender identity um it can be a very you know emotive issue it can be something that whether people are actually out or not within the university as another question that that always needs to be in the in the back of your mind um but i think as i say um just using whatever kind of networks you have is is really a positive way to approach it we're lucky here in Southampton in that we have an independent community bookstore which is actually very close to the university they do a lot of work around social inclusion really generally within the community and we've developed very close relationships with them so quite often if we're hosting an event they'll come along to sell books at the event and but equally they will help us to promote some of the things so the online events that we've just been going through they've been posters up in their shop as well to just get that broader community involved and i think the other thing that is important particularly when it comes to LGBTQ communities is actually the visibility it's one of the reasons that i bring in my personal experience to this because nobody knows from looking at me whether i am LGBTQ myself or not i wear my rainbow lanyard which i hope again is sending a signal to anybody who's using the library that this is a safe space this is somewhere where they are welcome it doesn't necessarily communicate about my own experience but i think just being out as a senior manager sets the tone for the rest of the library staff to feel that they're in a safe space i hope to to be to be themselves to bring them home their whole selves to work and i think there is a very close relationship between a sense of belonging in our user communities and a sense of belonging in our library staff communities as well i don't think you can have one without the other so again i would you know encourage anyone who is is comfortable enough to do that to be open about there to bring their whole self to work and be open about that as well. Thank you, i've got a few questions now of Sarah quite a lot of interest in in the scanning work i guess the first one they're a bit broader than that is is do you have a team to do the inclusion work? Yes we do so my team is the subject inquiry team we are an inquiries team as the name would suggest so there are three full-time members and we undertake all of the well not all of the inclusion work but we undertake the kind of direct support with our disabled community and yeah it's it's quite a laborious process to make a scan book with all special characters and equations and things i would say okay so i did a 20 page excerpt for the student in the case study i would say that probably took around six to seven hours to correct everything and make sure it was fine and so yeah we're a very small team but we're very enthusiastic and we we love the work that we do and we also yeah the question goes on to say do we check the files from the publishers for accessibility we do and we find that they're not always you know OCR isn't always enabled the headings are often a mess so yeah we do kind of spot check as much as possible but i mean it is quite a time consuming process so we unfortunately don't have the capacity to do as much as we would like to do but yeah thank you there's also another question here about particularly about the abbey fine reader and its ease of use and how it might compare to adobe accessibility feature or census access so um i've not used a census access myself so i can't really speak to that but um i find adobe a little bit more difficult to use that perhaps is just a personal thing for me um i find abbey it is yeah i find abbey is a lot easier to um to use basically it's a lot more intuitive there's less kind of strange wording and jargon that you have to learn so uh yeah i think it's easier definitely less strange wording in jargon a definite benefit i know um there is another question for you sarah um asking if you could explain more about the tag for the digital organisation collections okay what is it yeah so that's me using weird jargon so um when it comes to reading lists what our academics do is they build um a list for their specific course what they are able to do is using a form add a completely new citation for a new item which is not held on our catalog so they generate a completely new item they add you know all the metadata isp ns titles all that stuff and then once they've created it added it to their reading list the way that they request any sort of purchase or digitisation from us is by just clicking on a little tag and there are a few tags so essential item please purchase an e-forma i think is one of them and the decolonisation tag is the other so it's just um the method that we use to have purchase requests submitted to us using leganto if you get in touch with me if you've got my email address get in touch with me off this call and i can show you that sounds like a great offer thank you um we have a question for david um do you know of any examples of how inclusive terminology has been used to describe moving image footage in catalogue records um the simple answer to that is no i don't we don't have a lot of moving image footage here in our main collection which is where we've really been focusing our work as i say over the last a couple of years and but i'm more than happy to have a look and see if i can find something out heather and i will come back to you on that thank you um i've also got uh take the chance to to ask a question of my own um i'm quite interested in how um all the casers we've heard about today um how they've been influenced by existing collections and how they might have actually gone on to or go on in the future to influence collection development within your libraries um i don't know if anyone's happy to go first i could pick that up um if you like i again i mentioned the fact that we have a very big project underway here at the moment which is collection development and discovery it's particularly focused on the heartbeat library where we have 500 000 print items still which really haven't been managed and edited very heavily over the last few years so we've been engaging a lot with our communities around how we can actually reduce that collection a little bit keep a core dynamic collection here move some to off-site storage um but then also discard some of the material that is easily available through library networks as well and we have very explicitly made a commitment to diversifying the collection as we start to go into you know managing that when we get to the end of the project as well and so again it was an opportunity for us to completely revise our collection development policy to again engage with people around that to make sure that we were bringing a number of different voices into how we actually manage collections going forward and it's it's worked very well we did have um you know some as you can imagine some anxieties in some areas in particular arts and humanities who are still very print focused I think um have you know had some concerns around that but I think we have managed to address that it's been quite time consuming for us to do but again just that opportunity to share the library's intentions really with its collections I think sometimes because we're such a feature of university life and you know a lot of academics who've come into the the profession have of kind of bringing in their experience from their own own lives as students in libraries it's been a real opportunity for us to re-engage with some of those people we brought them into the library taking them on tours talked to them about the way we approach things and that ED&I message is really always very high at the top of our list in terms of how we make sure that you know we're diversifying the collection but also that we're actually making it visible so how we actually make sure that the students and staff can actually find those materials once we're actually incorporating them into our collections and that that goes for print and ED&I as well. Thank you um I don't know if Sarah or Ross and Ivy also have some reflections. Yes um so here Aberdeen our staff group recently undertook a task and finish group to look at collections development our previous collections policy is quite old I think it was last updated in maybe 2014 or so so it's well overdue that we that we do this so we were able to develop some really clear principles in what is important in our collections um and take care of what we've got you know we're we're an old institution our modern collections are are quite old and it's important for us to highlight the diversity that exists here already but also augment you know so um what we do is we have a form on our discovery system primo where people are able to submit comments maybe our metadata is wrong or you know uses outdated terminology is offensive things like that so um we have opened the floor to our community and saying what is important to you and we do a lot of consultation with groups here on campus. Thank you yeah it's great to get people you give people those opportunities um Ross and Ivy? Yes um so the art collection here at the university we've we've really since kind of 2016 we've really been focusing more on diversifying the collection and I'm really making sure that the quality of the collection is up to a museum grade standard and so then we have looking at looking through as I'm making my list of works um there's plenty in the collection and also we're looking outward um to to the harness relationships with other um other galleries and museums across the UK and and further afield um so that's one thing that we're we're doing in um in art but then uh we're very lucky that the um exhibition is happening that they were in a museum and uh the senior curator Rachel Barkley as well as the um as the Royal Assistant Curator Jill Ramsey they're both so keen and eager um and love the idea of that scale that they're going to be including their queer objects throughout their own collections um and putting them in their permanent displays um so that that scale is not just you know this and that wall and this little gallery um but that the the the queerness expands the entire remit of the of the Oriental Museum and it's not just a temporary exhibition these works are part of the part of the permanent displays of the of the Oriental Museum um which really shows that that I think Ross touched on this earlier but queerness isn't a western thing and it's certainly not a new thing um so having that being able to look through our history um global history um and to see the kind of ancient roots of of all of this I think is um I think is really important and not just focusing on um our kind of I guess it kind of links in with that decolonising views it's decolonising the way that we look at diversity and inclusion um and belonging looking at all of those things um and trying to look outwardly and see how other cultures have been doing and appreciating um such diverse individuals for millennia. That struck team and I was you give a topic like this to these young people kind of school aged pupils and they have really strong opinions interests ideas they can shape they can do it and I think one thing that I've learned that I'd like to implement going forward I think we've learned collectively as a team you know you you take something which we saw as an assessment that Ivy did and then we'll just run with it and actually just because it's assessment you can kind of look at stuff so even just within our own little practice those little changes it's quite interesting how just be a bit brave and it can go in all sorts of directions which we were quite proud of and we thought we were quite brave before but then we'll see where this goes and see where Ivy goes so we're doing all right, onward laden.