 The aim of this session is to provide a safe space for discussion, to challenge our thinking, learn from current initiatives and provide a forum for change. We will be discussing some sensitive topics. What we're looking for today is people to collaborate through the spirit of open curiosity. People making antagonistic comments or questions may find that those are not responded to by myself or the panel because we are looking for productive, open and welcoming conversation. So we're going to move through into the first part of today's session which is three presentations from our panelists. Following the presentations we will have discussions about those presentations. So as I said put comments and questions in the chat as they go through. We'll then move on and discuss the results from the Jamboard and the main speaker. Our first presenter today is Rachel Minot. She is a Jamaican-born artist, curator and researcher. She's currently Inclusion and Change Manager at the National Archives and trustee of the Museum of Homelessness. Previously she has been chair of the Decolonising Guidance Working Group for the Museums Association and co-author of Supporting Decolonisation in Museums 2021. Curator in of Anthropology with the Focus on Social Practice at the Horniman Museum and Gardens. Researcher and co-author with the exhibition The Past is now Birmingham and the British Empire in 2017. She's also worked with Birmingham Museums Trust on Within and Without Body Image and the Self in 2018. As an artist she has exhibited in the fourth ghetto biennial, Biennale, sorry it's always a word I struggle with, in Porto Prince, Haiti in 2015, the Jamaica Biennial 2017 and her solo exhibition Thinking About Jamaica at the Wilston Gallery 2019. Rachel is going to be reflecting on chairing the Museum Association Decolonising Guidance Working Group through the start of the COVID-19 pandemic along with co-creating a risk assessment for communicating tentatively upsetting history and a matrix for inclusion of the archives. We'll pass over to you now Rachel. Great thank you very much. So good afternoon. As Sally said my name is Rachel Minott my preferred pronouns are she and her. I am a mixed race woman with brown curly hair, I'm wearing glasses, a headset and a signature of mine some fabulous earrings. Today I've got some lightning bolts. So thank you all for your time and energy on the last day and the last session of what has been a thoroughly engaging and challenging in the best way conference. I hope my offerings will prove useful in our continued collective learning. So with my presentation I'll be running through some of the considerations when co-creating guidance for the sector reflecting on museums and archives with a focus on specific questions that arise when dealing with the quality diversity and inclusion content and the processes informed by the ethos of these pursuits. So I was the chair of the Decolonising Guidance Working Group for the Museum Association between 2019 and 2021 and I'm currently an inclusion and change manager at the National Archives in the Archives Sector Development Team, a position I also held since 2019. Both of these roles required collaboration during the changing world of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the heightened discourse on racism and anti-racism that were inspired by the murder of George Floyd. These collective traumas made more of us aware of the imbalances and systems of care and justice across marginalized identities. The resources I will discuss today had the intention of activating people to pursue equality during this time from two very different angles. So for this session I will be reflecting on co-creating the risk assessment for communicating potential upsetting histories. I am not going to talk about the matrix today because we've got quite a short session and that plus the museum association reflections would take up quite a bit of time. So the risk assessment should be published very soon. Its aim was to unpack the real and perceived risks associated with using records relating to marginalized people, to raise confidence through education on ideas linked to upsetting histories, and to equip services to work thoughtfully with these records to make them more visible. This was co-created in partnership with the inclusive art practitioner, John Slay, as well as in collaborative workshops with sector professionals. The second guidance documents are effected on as a supporting decolonizing a museum's guidance for the museum association, which intends to educate on decolonial theory, advocate for its application, and provide guidance to start this work in museums. This was co-created with a 13 person working group and was informed by stakeholder consultation and surveys. As this is a short provocation before we move into the more interactive elements of the session, I will focus my reflections on these documents through a few key ideas which I will move through quite swiftly, but I'm happy to return to in the discussions. So, number one, when doing this work is essential to consider power and privilege baked into the processes and perspectives that inform your guidance, understanding where it is within your power to co-opt and silence marginalized voices, even if you have good intentions. For example, an early consideration of the supporting decolonizing work was to not define decolonizing as if we had just discovered it as if it were a new idea and not just an idea that some people were new to. With the risk assessment, as the National Archives, we're always aware of providing guidance to the sector when providing guidance to the sector that our position is unique, and the resources available to us and our position to government creates a unique context which cannot really be replicated in all the services and so cannot be baked into our guidance. So we have to work really hard when we include ourselves in the guidance to provide it as an example of in practice without an expectation that this can or should be replicated. The second key idea to consider is who's involved, who's it for, and who is this about? There are key, there are some important slogans that activists use when talking about this sort of thing such as nothing about us without us that acknowledge the need to work with people who are affected most by the issue that you're facing or who have the deepest insights into this work. Get the right people at the table first and if you have been invited to sit at a table that you feel alone in your role as representation or like there is insufficient diversity and thought and experience around the table, challenge this, request another seat, use your privilege in being present and invited to widen the table. For the supporting decolonizing guidance that meant having representation from different disciplines within the museum sector at the table and consultation from stakeholders who did not operate in these spaces full-time. The working group was made up of practitioners at different levels and specialities who used decolonial theory to inform their work as well as a mix of geographic locations. This allowed us particular reflections on the urban versus rural dynamic to this practice which was really fruitful and important in our explanation of relevance. Similarly for the risk assessment we work to find representatives from archives of different sizes located in different regions and within different sectors to have a comprehensive idea of what upsetting histories could inform this work. The third idea is scaling advice. Is it applicable and is it relevant? For both pieces of work we needed to ask how these guidances can be used in entirely volunteer run or sole worker contexts. It meant addressing critiques that decolonizing is not relevant to our context and acknowledging that we cannot assume upset and so noted that these were all potentially upsetting histories. Often this means being less prescriptive, embedding inclusive principles that allow guidances to be made bespoke to each context in reality and as a large organization to offer support and further resources to users alongside the guidance. To do this the Museum Association have a decolonizing confidence and skills program and the National Archive connects this work to a larger suite of inclusion support documents and sector support resources. The fourth idea is having a shared understanding. When working collaboratively and working to make changes it is important to take time to ensure that you are working from a point of shared understanding embedding inclusive principles that allow guidances to be made bespoke to each context in reality. When you're a large organization it's important to offer support and further resources alongside the guidances that you present. To do this the Museum Association have a decolonizing confidence and skills program and the National Archive connects this work within a larger suite of inclusion support documents and sector support resources. The fourth idea is to have a shared understanding. When working collaboratively and working to make change it is important to take time to ensure that you're working from a point of shared understanding. For my work with the Museum Association it was quite late in the game when we asked the working group members if they believed that decolonizing museums was possible and in fact we didn't agree. The discussions we had on what our understanding of decolonizing and what decolonizing guidance could be was very rich and eventually led to the idea that we were supporting decolonizing practice and work but that this was not a guide that would claim that it could lead to a decolonized museum sector. For both documents there was also a need to explain nuanced terminology and so in both we have definitions of terms as a part of the final resources. We were really clear that the definitions we were applying when we were using them in the document. The risk assessment included definitions of things like inherited trauma and virtue signalling as well as more kind of basic terms like what was risk and what are stakeholders when we refer to them. While the supporting decolonizing document included definition of allyship and emotional labor as well as clarity and what we talked about when we meant item instead of object or specimen. And finally the final idea to think on is what are your motivations and shared vision? What does success look and feel like? There are many arguments that can be made for diversity, inclusion and equity and justice practices. They can focus on the moral and ethical imperatives. It is the right thing to do. They can be intellectual. The more information and more perspectives added to the public space the more people having access to the shared information. It could be social cohesion. If we understand each other better, if more people feel heard and represented there will be less social issues. And it could be commercial that we're only receiving income from limited sources because we haven't been interesting and relevant to diverse audiences. Some of us have very mixed motivations that touch across different justifications and some of those justifications are at odds with one another. It is understanding what our core motivations are that we will need to fall back on when we're making choices in the nuance of applying inclusion and decolonial thinking into practice. With the decolonizing working group I began the session by inviting all working group members to imagine the journey ahead to achieving decolonizing the sector. What were the first steps they needed to take? Who needed to be with them? And what did they need to know? But also where were we going and why were we on this journey? And even though I'm ending here this is where you should start. We can have our shared visions and values but our motivation in this work is the bedrock. We will likely have institutional motivations as well as personal ones. We'll need to see where they align and contradict acknowledging our likely points of conflict and trying to move through these by knowing why we're doing this not just what we're doing and how. So I'll end by returning to my individual motivation on working on these resources to activate people to pursue equality not just to think about it by creating supportive tools to do this work. I'm doing it because I'm tired of witnessing and accepting inequality and I want to be a part of the change and I don't want to do it alone. Thank you. Thank you Rachel. I think I can say on behalf of myself and most of the other people, if not all the other people at this session, you're not doing it by yourself. We will welcome you back for the round table discussion after our next two presentations. So our next presenter is Mel Bach who has been the Slobonic specialist at Cambridge University Library since 2010 and also the head of collections and academic liaison since 2017. She is the convener of the Cambridge University Library's decolonisation working group which first met in late 2020. Her presentation will provide a summary of decolonisation activities and challenges in Cambridge libraries and we'll look in particular at work underway to address imperial legacies in Cambridge collections in the context of Russia's war against Ukraine. So welcome Mel. So good afternoon everyone. I'm hugely grateful for the chance to talk to you about some of the decolonisation work that has been undertaken in libraries across the University of Cambridge and its constituent colleges and particularly to be able to include in this session the question of library decolonisation in the context of Russia's terrible war against Ukraine. Before any longer I should say I'm a woman with brown hair, tied up black glasses and I'm wearing a white top and I've just lost my one second. So I'm really grateful to be following Rachel's amazing talk. This is a slightly more applied but we also have a kind of the question about definition and so on so it's fantastic as I say to be part of this session. So decolonisation style activities have been going on in Cambridge for many years sometimes influenced by student or academic activity sometimes independent of them. Decolonisation in general here really gained momentum five to seven years ago through student projects most visibly I would say in an open letter to the English faculty and in 2019 a number of library staff interested in decolonisation and recognising a need for some structure to help encourage this work formed the decolonising through critical librarianship group. In their launch email they described the group as an initiative inspired by the student-led campaign to decolonise the curriculum. It will provide a forum for librarians across Cambridge to learn from each other and develop our practices end of quotation. The decolonising through critical librarianship group has consistently delivered brilliant work sharing good examples through their blog whose address you see here arranging terminally workshops focusing on specific issues. The latest was about medical library collections for example and last year they published a chapter in the book narrative expansions interpreting decolonisation and academic libraries edited by Jess Krillian Regina Everett. Libraries have also been included in a university-led initiative what have been included in general university-led initiatives most noticeably the legacies of enslavement group. But the need for a formal working group commissioned by the senior management of Cambridge University libraries which I should just explain for those who wouldn't know is a structure that does not include college libraries to help embed and facilitate decolonisation work and to bring a more policy-led structure had become increasingly clear and the further momentum of the intensified Black Lives Matter movement following the murder of George Floyd saw the group put together over the summer of 2020 meeting for the first time in that September sorry I've got a bit of a cold. Our group deliberately and correctly includes non-library university reps as well as library and archive staff from across the collegiate university. They're important of course because the input of non-librarians is vital to help us understand the issues properly and to work out effective solutions together and among the librarians I wanted to point out that we have dedicated college library reps to keep that conversation and collaboration going and we also have a dedicated rep from the decolonising through critical librarianship group with whom we have a very good relationship between the groups and the very first task of the working group was to agree its terms of reference and we agreed that we did need to have a definition of decolonisation so picking up from Rachel's talk we needed a deep definition in the terms of reference we felt in so far as we understood decolonisation in terms of our work. So getting the definition drafts and agreed nearly nearly did for me but we did get there and here it is in brief summary that we see decolonisation as decolonial practice that it's about identifying and critically engaging with colonialist related power structures it's about transparency contextualisation facilitation of access working with university decolonial activities and broadening collection development. I also want to show the paragraphs that follow the definition particularly thing in italics we recognise that while the primary colonial legacy in Cambridge libraries relates to the British Empire Cambridge also holds material relating to other colonial powers past and present and that this is also part of our decolonial practice focus and that wording was came back because I was particularly keen to ensure that non-british colonial legacies should not be overlooked when we hold such extensive collections around the world and of course Russia's full scale invasion of Ukraine is a devastating reminder of these other colonial legacies. Putin has openly compared his so-called special military operation against Ukraine to pete the first wars of expansion or more specifically wars of reclamation in Putin's narrative. In the library context decolonisation work to address the colonial past and its violent embracing in the present involves many areas of library activities so this is kind of the very applied bit so I would like to go just through a few of these ideas in terms of Ukraine but first of all putting them in the context of work already done or underway in Cambridge chiefly under the auspices of the working group that I convene and or the decolonising through critical librarianship group so here's what I've lazily labelled as general examples and the next slide we'll have the same headings so catalogue metadata examples we've been dealing with the issue of illegal aliens as a library of congress subject heading an issue that still rumbles on we've successfully affected the change of the heading primitive law to customary law in the library of congress we've got a gradual project working on metadata for material from former colonies in our official publications collection which we managed to launch during lockdown. The classification many examples were shared in a decolonising through critical librarianship group workshop including examples from all across Cambridge. In terms of collection promotion my department wrote a series of content focused blog posts about anti-racist material in English and European language languages and my Hispanic colleagues ran a workshop for parents and children to explore Latin American cartoneras both to appreciate these amazing physical items but also to understand the economic realities that led to their creation. For collection development the examples here are the launch this year of a fund to enable more decolonisation related acquisitions for teaching collections whose budgets are a bit more restricted and deliberate and significant expansion of purchases through my department which also focuses on research menu and print but also in many ebooks. For community engagement the activities of the university libraries exhibitions team spring to mind especially the exhibition celebrating black members of the university of the centuries which was jointly curated with the black cantabes research society. So and I'm sorry I know I'm trotting through these very very quickly. So now these same categories again with Ukraine in mind here in Cambridge we have a lot of older metadata but even though it's actually in the online catalog still bears the traces of times when catteling was often done by those without sufficient language expertise so something in Cyrillic might just have been assumed automatically to be in Russian. We also have records where for example the Ukrainian form of Ukrainian cities and towns remains in its Rossophone form if the heading originally never matched the Library of Congress one so it never got an automatic upgrade. The classification certainly in the main university library our scheme our local scheme bears lasting hallmarks of empire in general and certainly in terms of the Russian Empire and black and of the Soviet Union. When I started here I was able to create a new class mark for Ukrainian literature for example but we lacked the resources to revisit all the previous classification decisions that would have seen older Ukrainian literature books placed in Russian literature. Now we're looking again at things like this with more determination to understand how much work they would involve in order to work towards any possible funding or project time. In terms of collection promotion we need to think more broadly about the audiences we want to reach and how we might reach them. It's about readers and potential readers of course but also about other librarians say and also simply a chance to promote and celebrate Ukrainian life and culture and history to as many people as possible. We have kept up a weekly blog post about Ukraine since Russia invaded on the 24th of February but there are other routes we should consider and are considering such as exhibitions for collection development. We are focusing at the moment on increasing our collections about Ukraine even more proactively in various languages in terms of material from Ukraine. We are both buying pretty much whatever our supplier can provide but we are also seeking a very rare approval for a budgetary rollover of funds modest but nevertheless so that we can be ready to support authors and publishers and vendors when their work can really return to something like normal. Finally community engagement we need to remember that our collections and their importance is now far far far more than simply if you can say that simply about academia. Cambridge has got a significant Ukrainian refugee community now and among them are displaced librarians and we need to think about what our collections can do for them for their well-being and their interest and hopefully think about what opportunities we can give them and so on and so forth. I do of course understand that not all institutions are in Cambridge's position where we have Ukrainian studies as an already well-developed, popular subject and where we have thousands upon thousands of Ukrainian books and very active collection development. I also of course understand that not all decolonisation leads in UK institutions are the same people who are paid to think about Ukraine related collections but I hope that some of these points will chime with each of you and that I've given useful food for thought. Returning very quickly to decolonisation in general, I should mention that we have also accomplished things like a framework for decolonisation work and that's on our web pages and I wanted to end by saying how much I look forward to seeing and hearing delegates thoughts particularly about how we might work together to maximise our collective time and efforts. For the decolonisation working group in Cambridge a big outstanding question we've been tussling with is about general staff education and training in order to give everyone confidence about decolonisation what it means for them and for their work and I'm sure that this is something we can work on together. And my last slide is a link to a blog post I wrote about Ukraine and decolonisation but you will see that in the very web address that we have an issue ourselves in terms of terminology because European collections is not exactly what we do in our department but thank you very very much indeed I hope I'm doing wrong. Thank you Mel that was really interesting. You and I need to have a bit of a chat about the Ukrainian decolonisation work as we have some of the same questions here at Glasgow. I'm sure you're doing Glasgow yes. Yes that's a whole conversation for us to have not part of a DCDC session. Our third presenter this afternoon is Carissa Chu. Carissa is a history PhD student and teaching assistant at the University of Hawaii. After completing her undergraduate in English Literature and History at the University of Edinburgh in 2019 and her MFIL in World History at the University of Cambridge in 2020 she undertook a nine-month equality diversity and inclusion internship at the National Library of Scotland. She is currently working freelance on two inclusive cataloging projects with the Imperial War Museum and Glasgow School of Art. So from September 2020 to June 21 the internship at the National Library of Scotland involved reviewing the development of their non-discriminatory library cataloging practices through a funded equalities diversity and inclusion internship. Carissa will share the rationale behind her inclusive terminology glossary which provides heritage professionals with a tool for identifying and when appropriate replacing discriminatory and outdated terminology in catalog records and beyond. I'll hand over to you. Carissa thank you. Hi thank you for the introduction. So I'm Carissa Chu. I'm a mixed race woman of South Asian and white heritage. I have dark hair in a ponytail and I'm wearing a lilac top. So as Sally mentioned I completed a nine-month EDI internship with the National Library of Scotland last year in which I was focused on the task of inclusive description and within the scope of this internship I was researching practical ways to address the issue of discriminatory language that appears not only in catalog descriptions but also across digitised collections, online learning resources, exhibitions and other kinds of web features. And the main goal of my internship was to help draft a policy that will govern the way that the National Library of Scotland manages its descriptive practices over time. This policy is not yet published. I have adapted a more general set of 10 principles for inclusive description work that I am able to share today which establishes the framework in which reparative descriptive work should take place and it sets the background for the inclusive terminology glossary that I'm also going to be talking about. So firstly acquisition or providing access to an item does not imply endorsement of any statements or opinions contained therein. So I come to this work as a historian who uses the archives to study the history of the oppression of mixed race people in 20th century East Africa. So I always start with this principle for the sake of emphasising that materials that contain discriminatory language and prejudice opinions are still historic materials that need to be collected, preserved and studied. However uncomfortable they might make us feel. So it is the duty of the cultural heritage sector to accurately maintain the historical record. It is not appropriate for cultural heritage professionals to alter or censor the original historical record including language contained within collections, published titles and official names. Cultural heritage institutions have a responsibility to meet modern descriptive standards and describe and interpret materials in a manner that is accurate, respectful and responsive to the communities who create, use and are represented in their collections. It is also the duty of heritage institutions to improve the quality of educational information for the purpose of enhancing and maintaining the authenticity, integrity and reliability of records and resources and to promote the ethical use of the information contained within these collections and resources. The original language in collections is harmful or discriminatory. Cultural heritage institutions should strive to provide additional historical context and appropriate advisory content. Description and interpretation should be harnessed as a tool to improve the discoverability of resources relating to underrepresented communities. Descriptive and interpretive practice should reflect professional values and ethics and contribute to a culture of accountability, trust and transparency and cultural heritage institutions have a responsibility to support their staff with the task of inclusive description work. This includes emotional support as well as professional development and training to ensure staff are equipped to complete inclusive descriptive work judiciously and thoughtfully and I know this is one of the questions that comes up on the Jamboard exactly what kind of training do we need to prioritize for this area of work. And then cultural heritage institutions should share their expertise and use their voices to reform national and international frameworks of agreed standards and vocabularies such as the Library of Congress subject headings that Mel mentioned earlier. And finally descriptive and interpretive standards will need to continue to be updated to reflect changes in knowledge, practice and values in the future. So having a set of principles or values like this can be really useful, especially as a starting point for reparative description work. However, it does need to go hand in hand with real practical changes, as well as wider reaching efforts to decolonize and dismantle the sector's inherited colonial structures. So working with some of the National Library of Scotland's online catalogs, I started to survey the presence of harmful terminology and make some suggested metadata changes. However, as I was doing this, I realized that I needed a list of historic terms that have been used to discriminate against groups with protected characteristics in the past. And I also needed to educate myself about the preferred terminology that these groups use today. And I found that there were some existing guidelines out there, but these did not relate to all areas of protected characteristics. And they were mostly produced in the USA, Australia and the Netherlands. And this has left an enormous gap in our knowledge about the language legacies of the British Empire. So to properly survey the National Library of Scotland's online catalogs, I needed not only some understanding of these different histories around the world, but also an in-depth understanding of the language of race, diaspora, disability and LGBTQIA plus issues in Britain and its former colonies, as well as specific local and regional terminologies and the differences across the UK. So this is why I decided to create the Inclusive Terminology Glossary, which is now available on Google Drive. So hopefully the link is going into the chat so anybody can contribute to it and help to improve the quality of information that it contains. In its current form, most of the information has been collated by myself using mostly online resources, although a couple of the sections have been subject to review by academics with expertise in relevant fields of history. So the glossary is designed with cultural heritage professionals in mind. So it includes notes on time periods in which particular terms were used if it's known, and it also contains archaic spellings and misspellings to help with the task of identifying discriminatory language and harmful materials across catalogs and collections, whether you are working to add content advice or content filters or make amendments to your metadata or other forms of description across websites. So it is split into different sections which is in some ways problematic because it enforces these divisions between different groups of people, but it's kind of for ease of use, the document itself put all together loaded too slowly, so I had to split it up somehow and it kind of reflects the ways that a lot of collections are still organized. So there's sections such as African American history and the Atlantic slave trade, Indigenous peoples of the lands now known as Australia, disability history, the history of antisemitism and LGBTQIA plus history. It does not necessarily provide an easy solution. It's not always as simple as replacing one term with another, but what the glossary aims to do is provide the historical context about this terminology so that we can make better informed decisions about the language that we choose to use. And it can also be used more generally by both heritage professionals and users to help locate materials relating to marginalised communities in the first place. There's just a few examples on the slide of some of the terminology that we changed in the archives and manuscripts catalogue at the National Library of Scotland. So for example, changing lunacy to mental health, Negroes to enslaved Africans and chattel slaves to enslaved Africans, and kind of supplementing terms like West Indies, Caribbean in brackets, and one epithet that we looked at in quite a lot of detail with the term Orientalist, which is an incredibly vast and vague term used to describe scholars or personnel who worked in any part of East Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East. So we tried to make those terms more specific. Yeah, so the question that I always get asked about this glossary is what is the future of the project? And to be honest, I don't exactly know. The National Library of Scotland are hoping to develop it into a shared online database, but they don't have the resources to do that in the near future. There's not a timeline on that project at the moment. And as an individual, I perhaps occupy an unusual position because I'm not permanently employed in the heritage sector. I see myself as the voluntary editor of the glossary at the time being. And my immediate intention is to make the information accessible and share it as widely as possible so that nobody else has to spend their time and energy repeating this research that I've already done. And I also want to invite contributions because I'm not an expert in all of these incredibly diverse areas of history. The guidance needs to remain dynamic and up to date, and it should reflect multiple perspectives. And what I would like to see is for the glossary project to get some funding behind it so that we can hire a series of editors and community groups who can periodically review the terminology guidance so that there is the remunerated involvement of the communities that are actually represented in the glossary to make it truly inclusive. So finally, I just wanted to mention that I also created the cultural heritage terminology network during my internship, which exists as a Slack page. There should be an invite link going into the chat, which you can join if you wish to share any inclusive description resources and engage in these conversations about the future of this work. There's also a Twitter page that you can follow. And I'm hoping it will develop into a website so that there's some kind of home for all of this discussion and shared resources about inclusive terminology in the heritage sector. But I'm excited to hear the rest of the discussion today. So I'll end my presentation there. And thank you for listening. Thank you very much, Carissa. That's a huge amount of work that you've done creating that whole glossary. So thank you on behalf of everyone who will make use of it in the coming years, no doubt. That is the last of our three presentations. So the next 45 minutes of the session are going to be taking up with various discussion. I'm going to ask the speakers to turn on their cameras and mics just now and join me for some questions around the presentations that you've just given. We do have a couple of questions sitting in the chat. The first one I think addressed to all of us, but also I think focused a bit more towards you, Mel. Almost all institutions in the UK have benefited in some way from colonisation. How is that addressed by the institutions during the decolonisation work, particularly thinking of the University of Cambridge with things like the Fitzwilliam Museum? Shall I take that one first then, Sally? So yeah, it's a very good question. And I think probably the best buyer can answer it in terms of Cambridge is by putting a couple of links into the chat, Catherine, because the legacy of enslavement group is a group for the entire collegiate university because those benefits have been felt by university institutions but also by some colleges. And also the University of Cambridge museums have specifically picked this up and have been doing a huge amount of work, workshops, consultations and planning of a big exhibition in connection with the Legacies of Enslavement. So I think if I put those links into the chat, I think the material you'll find there will be more eloquent than I can be. Thank you, Mel. Rachel, Carissa, have you got any thoughts on that or is it a bit more broad than the work that you've done so far? No, I think it's key in the idea of relevance. So when we were working with the Decolonising Working Group, there was a lot of questions around kind of organisations that didn't feel like they had an ethnographic collection feeling like this might not be worth this relevant to theirs. So we had to do a lot of thinking about what does Decolonising mean and how could it be relevant into different contexts. And that is a big piece of engagement work and it's a part of the starting kind of buy-in to get your organisation to understand that this is something to consider. And then for the risk assessment, it was framed kind of differently in that the risk assessment has broken down into different kind of topics and has some suggestions of risks and suggestions of the impact of these risks and then mitigations, as well as a blank risk assessment for people to fill out for their own context. But one of the topics is institutional reputation and one of the risks identified is that people outside of your organisation kind of talk about the legacy or history of maybe misdoings or it was more general than we didn't frame it entirely within the Decolonial context, but it was histories of your institution that might be problematic. And so the mitigation for that is to reflect, find out your history, study them well and not to be defensive against them, but to acknowledge the past and your part in it and to understand that this will be informing your ways of addressing these barriers and to be better. So similar, but like I said, the two documents have taken a very different approach to this issue, but they're similar just, yeah, framed differently. Here at the University of Glasgow, we have the historical slavery initiative, which I will post a link to in the chat as well. There has been a lot of work at the wider institution looking at how we benefited as a whole from slavery as much of Glasgow did. And what we can do moving forward as an institution to recognise that legacy and make reparations where that is appropriate and otherwise possibly what other initiatives on campus we can do to better reflect the modern institution that we are. So I'll pop the link for that in the chat. If anybody's interested, you can have a little read. I thought it was interesting there, Rachel, that you mentioned defensiveness. This is mentioned in one of the other questions that we have in the chat, and I know it's something that Mel and I have discussed before, and I'm sure, Carissa, you will have come across this in your work as well. The question that we have is, in terms of shared understanding, how important would you say it is to get all staff in a wider team to the same level of understanding of decolonisation, including those who may be more reticent if not defensive about this work before attempting to move forward practically with actions in smaller working groups? And it's Eleanor Lund who's asked this question, and they do note that this is something they find difficult, as well as knowing how to get staff who are more defensive on board. Anybody has any immediate thoughts they would like to share in relation to that question? Yeah, I have a few. So one of the things that I've noted throughout is that sometimes the words themselves are the barriers to the first barrier to kind of engaging with this information and that some of the people who most need to kind of walk through the door to learn more will be put off by certain terms. So I was working on a piece of work that was going to look at white supremacy, and we decided to not use the term in the title of the project and instead wanted to work towards something more broad so that the people who would most need to learn about it would not be kind of put off by those words. And I find that decolonising has become polarised. White privilege is something that has also a lot of polarising like initial responses. And so sometimes I lead with the definition before I say the word to try and get people closer to understanding. And within the decolonising guidance, we have a line in it that says, you know, this is what decolonising is. But if you're in a situation where you can't use the word decolonising, the practice is not the word. If you can understand it and you can embed it, then that's the practice, like do that. And if the word is the barrier that stops people understanding what it is you want to do, then it's worth parking the word and keeping the understanding I would say. And for the people who are most resistant, sometimes you start talking about what it means to decolonise without saying it or what it means to do inclusive practice and equality work without necessarily using the language because parts of the barriers is the wider discourse. Some of it is that people feel foolish and some of it that people feel like they're not allowed to be engaged in it. And there's a lot of questions about permission and the words sometimes feel as though they can be a boundary to permission to participate. And I want everybody to participate. That's really great. Thank you. I think getting over that need for permission is a huge step for some people. May I add a little bit as well, Sally? Certainly. Yeah, because I think, because as you say, we've talked about this before in the kind of separate group leading up to the session that, I mean, for me, I think that because a lot of the activities that have certainly happened in Cambridge, in the workshops that have been done, for example, by the decolonising through critical librarianship group, it is essentially a self-selecting audience. It's people who are already interested and feel that confidence about feeling that they can engage and also just even the confidence to feel that they can ask a question. And my concern is about those who are potentially like resistant. I mean, there will be some people who are very resistant. But I think my impression is that for most people, it's a case of reticence because they feel like, I think, as a kind of Rachel was alluding to people feeling they can't, they kind of missed the boat and they don't know how to catch up and they feel they've been left behind. And so for me, for all staff training, which we also say we're still kind of working on, there are two things I really think it is important for as many people to do as possible, because otherwise you will just widen that gap. And I don't want reticence to turn into a stronger feeling. It's something that most people should be able to understand in terms of their work and feel hopefully excited about. But also the other thing I think for us in terms of the question specifically about is it for all staff, is I think the question of where does decolonisation fit on a spectrum of EDI concerns? Because for example, again, my colleagues did a workshop about reader services and that was actually more about kind of anti-racist practice rather than about collections, which is the more standard focus for decolonisation. So that's something that we're kind of tussling with as an institution, simply kind of what training are we trying to do, what are we trying to do the training on? But even if it were just on collections, that is an intense part of many people's work. So I'm very keen to see it for as many people as possible because I do feel strongly that any kind of sense of resistance would largely disappear with education and conversation rather than just kind of continuing with things where people turn out because they're already interested, as I say. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I definitely agree. Carissa, you've got something you would like to add. Yeah, so I don't think I can answer the question, but I can share from my personal experience that I came into the National Library hired to complete this project, which obviously the management wants to be complete, they're all on board. But I have faced a lot of resistance and negative reactions to my work and obviously coming in as a woman of colour and as an intern. There was a lot of emotional labour involved because not all staff were in the same place when it came to that, so I think that's just something to be aware of, who's going to kind of bear the brunt of that resistance and how you can kind of, I don't know, kind of bring everyone up to the same level and kind of prevent that from happening. Yeah, we've actually had some interesting internal conversations on that front as well because University of Glasgow Library, like many, many libraries and other institutions are very hierarchical. And I think what you're saying there, Carissa, about the weight who's carrying that emotional labour and if we look at the demographics of our profession as a whole, the kind of global ethnic majority is really underrepresented at managerial level, but if these pieces of work are being led by managerial groups, then you have that imbalance in weight and how do you deal with that emotional labour and the intellectual labour when you have, it might be the junior members of staff who have the confidence and have the lived experience and have the motivation to get involved with these projects. But as you're saying, Carissa, we need to think about that emotional balance and putting too much weight on these people and how you redress that. I don't think any of us have a particularly concise or helpful answer to that musing, but it is something that I see coming up quite a few times. Maybe we needed another jam board. We already have five on the go, so it's perhaps a future session. Picking back up on your glossary, David has made a comment in the chat wondering if there is a role for any of the scholarly societies to support the glossary, possibly the Royal Historical Society. I think it's just more of a thought than a question, but yeah, I think it's a really good point that there's roots for exploration to get support for the editing and upkeep of that, because it's such a vast piece of work and really valuable to what we're all trying to do as we move forward with working. Isabel has asked, Carissa, if you can expand a bit on the resistance that you experienced, could you share a bit more about that? Yeah, so mostly in the area of work that I was doing, it's been a kind of misunderstanding that I want censorship, and it always seems to be projected on me personally. I was hired to complete a project. It wasn't my idea, although I do agree with it, and I am emotionally invested in it in certain ways, because I identify it as a woman of colour, and when people say that area of work isn't important, it shouldn't be prioritised. That obviously takes an emotional toll, as well as your kind of work being marginalised itself and not being seen as something that's important or deserves investment. I've also had people saying the N-word in front of me, even though I've explicitly shared my glossary and the guidance that you shouldn't be saying that. Generally, it's been the case that I'm mostly in predominantly white spaces, usually the only person of colour in the room at all, having to even just kind of explain some of these issues like decolonisation need to do this kind of work and describe people as human beings, not using dehumanising language in the first place, just is exhausting and something I wasn't expecting to do coming into the sector. I've also had kind of more seeing the users must be very fragile, the use of the word snowflakes as if kind of adding content filters and advice would take something away. If you choose not to use it, it doesn't change your experience of the archives, but it's an option that is there for people who don't want to see these kind of materials when they're looking for something. Thank you. I just want to echo that this is not an individual issue, because I have also experienced that throughout different stages in my career, and it's something that comes to my attention a lot, especially this idea of hiring in someone in the most junior and least powerful position to do the hardest job that also has a personal stake in their identity, and that the intellectual questions that are being asked of the work that they're doing is in itself challenging to someone's identity and reason for being present. So this is something the sector needs to look at really deeply when designing projects, and my advice is always not the most junior person and not alone. Hire two people, three people, connect them, and definitely have support hierarchically up so that that person can say no, this isn't my job, I'm here to learn, because most of the time people are engaged in a process of learning or developing their career as well. So I'm here to learn not to educate, take me on the journey with you, but I'm not leading it, and then have someone more senior that you can escalate issues to. Thank you, that's really, really helpful. There's quite a few comments come through in the chat relating to this line of conversation. So Joanna, I haven't missed your question, but we will come back to that in a little minute. Herbert has asked, Karissa, how did you manage to present sensitive information that can spark violence and chaos? Who did you manage and how did you manage and hold yourself when you came across information? Such information about slavery as a person of color within your research journey. So I think there's a couple of questions in there. One about how you managed to present your information in a very, very controversial information at some points in time. How did you manage to present that as clearly and rationally as you have? And how did you, perhaps a bit more of a personal question, but managing your own emotional turmoil when dealing with this material and coming across some of the information that you must have done in your research journey? Obviously, answer as much or as little of that as you feel able to. Yeah, thank you for the question. So I think personally, for better or worse, I'm quite desensitized to this kind of language and some of the imagery as well. As I mentioned, I come from a kind of more historical research background in which I do look at histories of racial marginalization and the British Empire. So I am kind of aware of that area of history and was kind of expecting to see these kind of materials. In terms of presenting it, again, with the nature of my work, I think my audience always kind of expected that I'm going to be presenting on areas where you're going to see discriminatory language and also very harmful imagery. I always give like a content warning at the beginning, especially when showing imagery. But I think that in some ways, it can get the point across to present the most shocking materials. I find that to kind of explain it, I always do my research. I can't speak on behalf of any of these communities that I'm not from. So I always try and look for resources written by the community members themselves. There's a lot out there. There's a lot more out there than you'd think. We think, how do we know how these people identify and what they think? There's so many published texts and sources available, even if it's kind of less reputable sources like blog posts and things, you can access them and kind of get an insight and always cite your sources as well. So I think that kind of answers the question. Yes, thank you. There's another comment just from Eleanor, which I'm sure echoes the sentiment of a number of us in the session this afternoon. Eleanor says, Carissa, I'm horrified that you've had these responses. It is extremely enlightening to me on how important it is to get everyone on board. Thank you for sharing. And then just to pull together a couple of these other comments that we've had come through, Liz says, we are a glam audience. Can we work holistically to address this issue or are practices issues across sectors too different, which ties into Joanne's earlier question, which says, it does feel like the Museum's Association Decolonisation Guidance is easily transferable to libraries and archives. Would there be any real differences or gaps? What do you think those of you on the panel? Do you think that guidance could transfer over? Do you think we have too many different issues across the sectors? I think the guidance transfers because one of the things we were trying to do is make sure it's scalable to different contexts. And there are a lot of museums that have archives. There's a lot of museums and libraries are in same building archives. And we're not as separated as we think we are. And when it's brought down to, you know, principles, they can be applied in your context as you see fit. We also try to get rid of the like job titles. We weren't saying like curators should do this. We were thinking like if you handle collection items, this is what you should think about. Obviously within museums and archives are the only two I can really speak to specifically. But the major difference is how things are cataloged to what level and how the audience are able to interact with the objects or records. And they're two very different intimacies. And so with museums, they're really concerned about trying to figure out how to get that kind of engaged, like one-to-one experience with the object and who's allowed to touch things. And that's just not a archival concern because people can access the actual archival material with relative ease. But at the same time, when you go into a museum, you don't need to present identification. So there are some bespoke issues that if you think about them within kind of power and barriers, you can figure it out and untangle. But I think definitely it's applicable across. But yeah, it's because even within our larger sectors, the contexts are so different that everything has to be kind of something that you can place and adjust. That's really helpful. Thank you. And I would agree that our similarities are greater than our differences. So it's been a really, really, really good conversation following on from your presentations. And the final question that we've got sitting in the chat links in very nicely to one of our Google Jam boards. So Eleanor has said, following on from David's comment, I would love to see more collective work going on to really strengthen the work which is going on in separate institutions. Whether this is organizations hosting, disseminating on working on collective resources, I think this could move us forward. I have no idea how to make this happen. Thoughts. So one of our Google Jam boards, the fifth number five, Jamboard number five, is what type of training and in what format do you think is most urgently needed? So if we could have a look at Jamboard five on the presentation on the screen. Thank you, everybody working speedily in the background. We can add up a couple of these and hopefully have a little bit of a chat around them. Let me just make my screen a little bit bigger. So I can read the post-it notes on the Jamboard because my eyesight is not that good. Excellent. So we have training and building confidence around it being okay to try things and then being imperfect. What is that a general feeling that people could work with? We have a culture change training. Do you think those two probably link up quite well together? And then we have a comment about training on decolonization 101. Help us to think about what this means struck by Rachel's job title, diversity, equity and inclusivity. We are not fixing a problem. We are developing a new way to practice, which is someone's trying to do some Jamboard magic for me. Thank you, whoever that is. So while that shuffling is going on, are there any thoughts from you three on our panel about the sort of training which you have encountered as being relevant in your institutions? Or if that training could be a way to bring us together to start to share the work that we're all doing instead of kind of duplicating a bit? There you go. Are we developing a new way of practice, which is called? Sally, if I may say a few, I think that the experience we've had so far here in terms of the training sessions kind of helped delivered by our decolonizing through critical librarianship group. I think we know that that kind of session is the most effective to have a real focus and kind of an openness that is easier in a smaller group and so on. And I think the thing that we're being challenged by here, among other things, is about the scaling up of that. And I think the other thing, which is why I think we need to be working towards some kind of general introductory training, I totally agree that one of the things that worries me is there are so many of us in our institutions individually tussling with these ideas. And so anything we can share, including learning from what other sections have done, so the Glam Point, the museum guidance and so on, we should make the most of everything that's out there already. But I think that ideally, I think practically here we need to try to develop whether kind of nationally or locally, some general training that then also helps managers continue those conversations so it doesn't just become a kind of one-off thing that you attend, but it becomes something that you understand more and more and more through discussions locally, which is so kind of trying to get that workshop thing in a gradual way. But I think the other thing I wanted to mention is that I think it's important that we do remember that it's not like if we take kind of, I suppose, the more museum terminology that it's training that's not just for a curatorial level, this is an important matter for all staff. And as I say, I mean, you could say there are very specific staff depending on what we're concentrating on, but that it's not something that becomes something that only staff above a certain grade are involved in. It's got to be open to everyone. And so that's the other thing I suppose on my mind. I guess that taps into that one post-it note just slightly off-center that says culture change training. I mean, that's really what we're talking about, isn't it? We're looking at our culture. We're looking at how we've got where we are and considering whether that needs a shift and I think recognising that it does. There's another comment on this board, which I think in the centre top, which links to the emotional labour comment as well, about somebody using reverse mentoring or senior leadership at the university received this and it has led to a lot of positive change. And I'm wondering if that links to the comment that says about considering emotional labour and what's being put on individuals, how can institutions support be given more appropriately, guidance on appropriate framing? Do you think there's a place for reverse mentoring as an opportunity to kind of pass some of that emotional labour further up through the hierarchies in our institutions? The Race at Work Charter has reverse mentoring as one of their main points of advice and it seems to be a really useful tool for kind of empathy building as a longer kind of awareness training and some organisations that prefer kind of championship versus allyship, but those are all kind of similar ideas of getting someone to understand an issue that's outside of their lived experience, but to also work towards it being a priority for them to tackle. I just wanted to return to the title of this board though and I think it's really important that we acknowledge that when it comes to this idea of training around this, that the university students who are studying kind of heritage degrees at the moment are learning a lot around decolonising and community practice and participatory work and so the workforce that's coming up now is a lot better informed at that point and I know I've done a couple of guest lectures around this kind of topic at different universities and it seems that there is a kind of it's building into that curriculum so it's interesting to think about the training that's needed for the established workforce that's already gone through training to retrain for some of these ideas and the sort of workforce training and understanding. We sort of met people at where we started to meet people at then where they are in terms of language so that's why the risk assessment is a risk because that was the thing that kept coming up anytime we were talking about diversity, equity and decolonising projects was this perceived risk and we wanted to acknowledge it and make it real to say okay what is the risk that you think it is and if and you know what's the potential impact and how do we mitigate it so we're not just being you know risk averse but we're also not being kind of risky in our behaviours we're actually understanding it as something that we need to pursue thoughtfully but I think more bespoke training rather than like the general kind of diversity training tends to be too light touch and starts back at zero and if we're assuming that our workforce is not entirely white it can be quite difficult when you're always being brought back to zero into the conversation that you're quite ready to have a more sophisticated engagement with. Yeah you start to wonder where the next step is. Yeah and it is quite jarring when you are a person of colour and training that's clearly not meant for you that that's just an experience to also be mindful of. But these are the experiences that a lot of the time need to be shared. If we could move on to Jamboard number two which is of course sorry I'm losing all my numbers in different places Jamboard number four sorry which is about recording and sharing good practice because that is something that we're really interested in in learning about I know personally I'm on three different working groups which which tip their toe into decolonisation I'm sure many of other people are in a similar place so we're looking at the best ways to record and share good practice and I think a decolonisation network so we're sharing work coordinating activity and not reinventing wheels that taps into a large part of your glossary creation Carissa you were saying that you didn't want people to have to duplicate that work and I think that's that's a huge thing that we all see is there's a lot of this activity going on at different institutions it isn't as open and public as as your glossary do any of the panellists think that this is the best way for us to go round build go forward sorry building building on the work that's been done so far yeah may I may I say something to that Sally that I think I definitely think so I mean I think that that feeling of having of that that's the idea of reinventing the wheel each time is when there is so much experience out there to learn from and an experience that's not necessarily it doesn't necessarily mean expertise because I mean I wouldn't know I would you know but nevertheless the the experience that can help others develop their projects and I think that having um you know ideally it would be lovely to have a kind of a unified web resource that allowed you to kind of filter by area of library or archive work just to see kind of brief summaries pointing to other places so you can just track what's been done because yes as you said but as Carissa said like with with what she's done I mean it's an amazing amount of work and an amazing result and could you know and the thought that others might be doing the same thing rather than looking at it and adding more just seems you know we've got to come up with a way of making sure we can share these things as as as much as possible because I think for you know something that we've been kind of touching on a little bit has been the fact that for that for a lot of people involved in in decolonisation work it's often on top of other jobs it's something that is kind of so can be seen as an add-on when it should be given you know it should be given more time so the thought that people haven't necessarily got the luxury of much time for thought and action and still doing the same thing that somebody else somewhere at another institution has done seems seems incredibly counterproductive so no very specific solution but yes please let's find one I think yeah and I guess Rachel was saying that her framework is is designed to be scalable as well so there are these pieces of work that people are doing and we do we do know they exist but I guess what how do we find that mechanism to share so how do we how do we promote what is already there how do we make sure that that everybody is included in the inclusivity work it's that's that's the hard bit isn't it because there's so many different ways to reach people now and as you say mail everybody is so busy how you know how are we going to build on that there's no answers this is just a amusing point so I'm just going to return to a couple of comments that have been coming through in the chat while we've been we've been talking and there's some conversation between Isabel and Eleanor looking at hostility that people have experienced from other organizations and companies including the press there's been a couple of pieces both the spectator and the telegraph about flagging up decolonization work that has been getting done in in libraries archives and museums being viewed negatively in those in those contexts and I think that feeds back into some of what you were saying Carissa about the resistance that you experienced while you've been working and Penny echoes that saying as someone who's not a librarian but who began working in libraries 12 months ago they find it difficult to be accepted and allowed to do the job they were employed to do which is not encouraging but it does really evidence why these conversations are important and finding that platform for us to share the work that we're doing and to know that there are people out there who are doing similar work and there is a support network especially for people new to the sector and it was another one that I've lost there's a lot going on over here and Neil said that at an IRLA event last year they heard someone try out some accessible definitions of diversity inclusion and equity with diversity being everyone is invited to the party inclusion as everyone gets to choose some music and equity as everyone can get on the dance floor and they don't know how effective that is as an articulation but do simple analogies have a role in trying to break down these large and complex topics I mean I'm certainly always happy for a party analogy what do you think Rachel? I think with definitions it's always interesting to get the person's individual access point and some people really need like metaphors to grasp this this idea I think that they can be really useful for starting the conversation it's bad when they end there because that's a limited understanding of what those those ideas are because you know why can everybody not get on the dance floor needs to be sort of like the unpacked version of why why would equity be getting on the dance floor is it that you know there was a barrier in place it was 10 flights of stairs before you could get on to the dance floor you said that it was a segregated dance floor it's men only women you know that sort of thing so yeah it definitely is an entrance way I think whatever conversation with different people different ages if you're just trying to talk to children about the sort of thing it's also different entry points if you're talking to university students I think for me it's always really important when we think about equality work to remember that we're in like that we're being put into the fight for equality like we're putting ourselves into the history of fighting for human rights and longer equality battles and so that that weight is sort of important to me but that's because I need I try to convey the gravitas of the work that's really helpful thank you does do either you Carissa or Mel have any thoughts on analogies and metaphors do you find them useful in your work or do you prefer to be direct it's very thoughtful faces I think I probably I probably prefer to be direct but I recognize I think one of the important things we all need to recognize is that our own preferences aren't necessarily work for other people so yeah that's useful for food for thought for me excellent and if we can just move on to jamboard number three we'll finish up looking at these and I thought this was a nice one to finish on is people sharing examples of good practice around decolonization from their institutions so there is a lot happening there's a lot of good practice and as we said before a lot of it is is how we make sure that everybody can find that information and and build that network or those networks and so just to pick out a couple of these is a lot of links going on dig where you stand Sheffield archives and partners looks like they did something around Black History Month AR e diversity allies work especially the compilation of resources of potential relevant accessible form is available online one organization had a reading group session on Marilyn Clark's chapter liberating the library what it means to decolonize and why it is necessary from the narrative expansions book that was mentioned earlier on another group had some zoom meetings with curators on the subject of museums and how best we can decolonize our system at the same time without taking violent extremist approach which I think is interesting is anything which is sensitive can be made out to be extreme so we have to take care and there's a good couple of other links kicking about there for people to follow up on later and one link mentions the we here seek to provide a safe and supportive community for black and indigenous folks and people of color in library information and science professions and education programs so that's a very useful link as we discussed more junior members of staff carrying that emotional burden so just as a reminder this session has been recorded and it will be made available on the platform and through YouTube in the next week and the links to the Jamboard where at the chat at the start of this ask if the Jamboard links can get popped in the chat again for finishing up they will stay alive people can read through them they can add a little bit more content that would be very appreciated and we have one final question for Rachel sitting in the chat and building from your presentation how best do we present the subject of decolonization without being violent or passing negative comments or offensive statements to our peers not a straightforward question that one so I normally present decolonizing alongside questions of anti-racism and I would tend to compare the two and I would explain why I like decolonizing as a guiding ethos so for me anti-racism really centralizes racism you really need to understand racism you're unpacking it and you're challenging it but it means that at the center is something very painful and something very real that we need to acknowledge and it is really important work one of the reasons that I love decolonizing practice is because at its center is creative reimagining and it puts into the center people's voices different people's experiences and tries to move the dial and who has the microphone and who's able to kind of influence change and really what's very beautiful about decolonizing is that you can play you can play with the ideas go you know this is something we're working with does it need to be that let's play around with it see what sticks say what doesn't let's experiment let's get somebody else involved let's all change roles let's you know be active participants and understanding if the things that we have held true because they were taught to us through the process of colonization how many of those things they'll need to be true how many of those are ridiculous and how can we think of different ways of being together and it's so it's really participatory it's not actually that violent but it acknowledges violence is there but it encourages sort of creativity participation and play and to me that's the best entry point into decolonizing practice