 In our first case study, we're going to hear for the next 20 minutes from Imm لكن Clarke from the Science Museum, Elli Mağd's from the London Transport Museum and Ella Neckarta from the Welcom Collection to reflect on the experiences of setting up a network to discuss ethical contemporary collecting and those nuanced and complex issues around how we go about collecting during the pandemic. So over to you ladies. Diolch yn fawr, i'r fawr, ond, elin yn dweud y blynyddiad, ac yn fawr i'r gweithio ar draws y bydd y cysylltu, ac rwy'n mynd i'ch gweithio yn gwybod i'n gweithio a'i'n fawr ac wedi'u fawr am gwrthodol sy'n cael ei gweithio. Rwy'n meddwl Llyr Llyr Llyfrgell, oherwydd, yn ymweld, yn ymddangos ei ddweud, mewn meddwl i'r ardig yng nghymru, yng Nghymru Llyfrgell, ac yn ymweld i'r ardig yng nghymru. I amgylcheddodd yn cael ei ddweud y mae'r ddweud yn y ceisio'r ddylai'r ddweud yma'r ddweud. Ond ddiddordeb y gallwn i'r ddweud yma, o'r ddweud yma, o'r ddweud o'r ddweud yma, o'r ddweud yma, o'r ddweud yma'r ddweud yma, o'r ddweud yma'r ddweud. Dyma'r ddweud yma o'r ddweud yma o unedws ac unedws. Rwy'n ysgrifennu a gwirionedd yna, sy'n ddweud yma, oherwydd mae'n amser eu ddweud. I'll start by introducing a pre-existent network. I'll talk through how it took shape and grew and the kinds of discussions that the group were having at the start of the pandemic. I hope that this will give you some context, some sense of the concerns and discussions where the field was at as the pandemic took hold. Eleanor will then discuss the formation of the new networks which were generated specifically to address collecting around COVID-19 as opposed to contemporary collecting more generally. Eleanor will reflect on the development of these discussions and talk about how adapting the group and expanding it using a new platform worked to focus attention and make connections across organisations in ways that wouldn't perhaps have happened otherwise. Imi will then take this conversation into a more focused direction looking at how these discussions have informed the guidelines and work of one particular organisation. Imi will demonstrate how these broad approaches circulating in the network are applied in very practical ways. Perhaps I can have the next slide please. Thank you very much. I'll begin about five years ago talking about the origins of the contemporary collecting group. I think it's important to note that there have been several attempts over the years to establish and maintain a network for people working on contemporary collecting. But today I'm just going to focus on the network that we have now that goes back to 2016 when Rachel Minot and I organised a symposium at London Transport Museum. What we tried to do there was reflect back on the history of contemporary collecting, taking the perspective that had been going on for at least a century in various guises. Perhaps I can have the next slide please. Thank you. This initial event was followed by a meeting in London in 2017 for those working on contemporary collecting where we sought to branch out beyond the social history in London focus of the first event. At this meeting, which I think was Chatham House Rules, practitioners shared their recent work and discussed the challenges that they had when they were carrying out this work. It was a really nice opportunity to share some of those dilemmas, those challenges and difficulties and those naughty parts of contemporary collecting with others engaged in the same kind of work in different contexts. Over the next year there were a whole series of meetings, tours and presentations in London and Manchester and in summer 2018 I set up a gysmal to keep in touch and circular information. This was followed by a whole series of sessions, a fantastic tour and how we did it meeting at Islington Museum about the echoes of Holloway Prism exhibition and collecting project for example, in which Roscari and Jen Cavana reflected and shared the ways that they had encoded and enacted processes of consideration and care in their collecting, which was really, really influential and interesting to me and others. Gabrielle Heffernan organised a fantastic symposium at Tully House Museum and I organised a very ill-attended social in December, which was in fact attended by two curators and one sleeping toddler. As might be apparent, this is a very informal network. The contemporary collecting group, as it stands today, is incredibly informal collective. It has no budget, hierarchy, committee or anything like that. It's just a group of people who've come together to share discussions and people volunteer to organise events that we had one last week with Simon organised from Buckstown County Museum. As I said, there's no budget, so museums often give support in kind, provide catering and occasionally in the past have been travel bursaries for attendees that individual museums and organisations have sponsored. We actually have another tour lined up for late March 2020 of the Medicine Galleries at the Science Museum. Perhaps I could have the next slide please. Thank you. Oh, it's a little lag. Never mind. So what I'd say was the discussions at these events tended towards focusing and sharing on the challenges and the kind of considerations that are made in running contemporary collecting projects. And so we ran a workshop on ethical considerations in contemporary collecting at London Transport Museum in March 2019. And this was a chance to kind of identify, discuss, share and start to unpack some of the most pressing ethical issues facing contemporary collecting. And through these discussions, and we subsequently did a broader survey, so people who haven't been able to attend the meeting could share their thoughts and responses. We kind of identified a series of five key themes, which we then turned into a toolkit of case studies, which was shared as a PDF and text file in March 2020. So the toolkit was arranged around these five themes, the idea of balance and how that can be delivered in contemporary collecting, how the question of decolonisation intersects with what that means in a contemporary collecting context, how climate emergency and contemporary collecting might intersect, the important considerations around trauma and distress, which have only become more apparent this year, and specifically, ethical questions specific to digital preservation. Next slide please. So as I mentioned, this was published as an open access PDF and as a text file, so it's easier for e-readers to use at the end of March 2020. So by that time, the membership of the mailing list had begun rising really rapidly. And of course, as you can imagine, the tour we had planned of the Science Museum was postponed. So I'm going to hand over to Eleanor now to continue the story. So I'm going to talk about sort of the next chapter in sort of where the contemporary collecting network went on from there. And really as the pandemic started to take hold and we were all starting to adjust to working from home and thinking about collecting, it became really apparent that we needed a new space to be able to do that, a way in which to be able to connect with other museums and libraries, archives and galleries, and to share our experiences of collecting as well as our fears and worries about doing that. So having spoken to Imogen and Ellie, we went about setting up a Slack channel, which is just an instant messaging platform, which allowed people to directly communicate with each other, and to really start to pick at those questions and the thorny issues surrounding collecting during a live event. We also held group video calls with seven online video calls held over the course of 2020, where we had between 10 and 50 participants. And we also shared resources and information within the Slack channel and on the contemporary collecting lists. I think when we think back to those early days of the pandemic in March of last year, stuff was happening so fast that within the contemporary collecting world it felt like things could easily just disappear if we didn't act quickly enough and if we didn't do something. And it also felt like there were loads of collecting projects springing up from diary writing projects to large scale and ambitious calls for material via social media. And certainly from my perspective it felt like everyone was doing something and I felt like I wasn't doing anything at all. And I think it's important to remember that and to remember that this was a moment where we were all as individuals outside of our work personas trying to grapple with and make sense of world changing events. So I think while what we were doing with setting up a chat channel and having Zoom video calls doesn't really sound that radical, I think it actually was in some ways a really unique opportunity for us to reframe ideas collecting and to think outside of our institutional barriers and to stop thinking solely about what it was that us at Wellcome Collection were doing or what someone else was doing at their institution, but instead to recognise that we're part of a much bigger whole and that in order to document this huge monumental thing happening, we really need to make sure that we weren't duplicating efforts and that we were aware of what others were doing and could support and help each other on it. And I think that's been a real strong point of the work that we've been doing has really been around trying to bring people together to sort of recognise that it's okay to sort of have all these concerns and questions around collecting, particularly during a live and traumatic events and that we can sort of hold this friendly space for those discussions to happen. And I think for me, one of the things that was particularly important when we were thinking about why we needed to collaborate was thinking about the types of histories that we can end up with if we're not working together well. And I think one of the examples of that is perhaps thinking about the idea of lockdown diaries and callouts for diary entries and how, while this can seem like a great way to engage people, it also can run the risk of being exclusionary by its very nature as a collecting practice. For many frontline workers, they were still going to work over lockdown, they may have been low paid and were often from ethnically minoritised backgrounds with poor protections against the virus. And their experience of lockdown certainly wouldn't have been the same as the majority of lockdown diaries that might have been captured that focused on the sort of baking sourdough and going out for your daily mandated walk. So I think this is something that stuck with me over the course of our collecting, thinking about whose stories we're collecting, where the gaps are and how we need to work together to make sure that this experience that we are all going through but in vastly different and unique ways is captured and is documented for future use. So in the early period, we also took on a contemporary collecting survey where we asked individuals working within organisations to respond and to provide information about what they were collecting, what their remit was and how the collecting was going if they had started. And this raised lots of people's worries and anxieties around collecting, which really helped to frame our later discussions. And I'm just going to end on this slide before I pass over to Imogen, but this is really just to sort of pull out some of the ethical questions that were coming out of our discussions. And concerns really ranged from things like practical questions around how to physically and safely collect and handle items to looking at the impact of trauma and how we can protect record creators and making sure that we're actually properly documenting collections as they come in so that we can ensure their use long into the future. We also talked about things like whistleblowing, the need to protect people's anonymity at protests, and the likelihood of a future COVID inquiry changing the way that records will be used in the future. And of course, while we were grappling with all of these complex issues, the killing of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement brought a new urgency to thinking about the power dynamics of collecting and whose stories are held. Sorry. So all of this sort of fed together and underpinned the work that we were doing as individuals within our organisations, as well as part of this wider network. So I'm just going to pass over to Imi on that who's going to speak more about the ethical frameworks developed at the Science Museum. Thanks, Alana. So, as Ellie and Alana have said, the ethics of collecting during a pandemic was really a reoccurring concern for the contemporary collecting group. And I'm going to speak about how these conversations helped inform ways of working at the Science Museum. Many of us spent those early months grappling with the situation as it unfolded, sharing thoughts, concerns, small triumphs and failures with each other on that Slack channel. The usual aspects of contemporary collecting that so many of us love were really thrown into question and imbued with new and profound complexity. In the medical curatorial team at the Science Museum, we were relatively familiar with the inherently personal and often sensitive nature of medical collecting with objects often closely connected to the challenging experiences. But I don't think anything could have quite prepared us for what was to come. The sheer complexity of the situation and the ethical conversations being had across the sector that the Science Museum group to form an advisory panel very early on in the project. And this is fairly unusual thing to do for a collecting project, or at least it is at the Science Museum. One of the main responsibilities of this panel was to give a steer to the ethical guidelines that needed to be central to our approach. Like many museums, we already had an ethics policy and collecting policy, but this unique situation really called for something more. So through wide consultation with organisations which included the welcome collection and building on existing guidelines and toolkits around contemporary collecting, the team created our guidelines. So whilst conversations were being had at high level, and in this advisory panel, we also kept track of conversations around ethical collecting in the Slack channel and referred to useful resources being shared by the group. Next slide please Alna. So to quickly note a few existing guidelines and toolkits which were helpful in considering our approach. The first is the Oral History Society's who published guidelines about collecting oral histories relating to COVID-19. So their guidelines warned that when interviewing healthcare or frontline workers, there is a danger that single session interviews that requires staff to talk about their thoughts or feelings may increase the likelihood of PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder. This resource along with noting that other organisations were already conducting oral histories, something that we could see through Slack channel conversations helped inform our decision not to conduct oral histories specific to COVID. The wider emotional cost of attempting to collect material associated with COVID-19 really led the museum community to debate and in some cases criticise the rapid response collecting approach. And this is an area heavily discussed by the contemporary collecting network and Slack channel and led to this idea, which is the title of our talk of kind of slowing down. The second thing to note is the museum associations code of ethics, something that many of us will be familiar with that was a framework to support museums to resolve ethical issues. And the MA also published their own statement about ethical collecting during the pandemic. And finally, the Contemporary Collecting Toolkit by London Pan-Spot Museum, which Ellie outlined earlier and in particular the theme on trauma and distress, particularly informative. Next slide please Alna. So I'll share a link to these in the chat afterwards, but I wanted to quickly talk through the main points in the Science Museum's ethical guidelines for collecting COVID. The first is, as the Science Museum group will make no communication or ask for any action that will take medical practitioners, NHS workers or those involved in response efforts away from their important duties. Knowing when to approach people was a constant discussion in the first few months on the kind of network channels and judging when or if we should contact people with a view to collecting has really proven to be one of the most delicate tasks to manage. So throughout the near year and a half that we've now been collecting, the team have really had to fluctuate in our approach, tentatively assessing the situation, attempting to track its severity, which given the unpredictability of everything that's happened in the past, it has been incredibly challenging. So the next is, we will take no action that might involve an increase in human contact at times of recommended isolation or lockdown. We will be respectful and sensitive to the fact that lives and livelihoods are at risk. We will ensure that our collecting is considered and properly documented to ensure maximum usefulness for future research and display. And this is something the team are now grappling with, it's bringing in and processing the material collected or proposed to the collection over the past 15 months, which is a huge feat. And this also comes with continued ethical complexities of assessing personal circumstances and comfort levels as we emerge from lockdown. Next we have, we will ensure our collecting is not duplicating the work of others and this is something Eleanor raised. This is where the slack channel was incredibly useful, knowing which organisations were attempting to collect what they were attempting to collect what gave us a real sense of the collective effort. And certainly for me a reassurance that we didn't have to attempt to collect everything. I'm sure there'll be plenty of mass and hand sanitizers to be found in collections going forward, but for those broader themes of oral histories or diaries and notebooks. This really provided us with clarity on what not to as well as what to to you. Imogen, one more minute. Thank you. We will ensure that our own staff are supported in collecting and displaying the material. So this is the final point and perhaps one of the most important, but has been equally challenging to assess. So these ethical guidelines have been incredibly useful and have formed a backbone to the science medium groups collecting project. Shaping the way we interact with potential donors and each other. And now after nearly a year and a half, the challenges of collecting during the pandemic continue to be significant and somewhat unpredictable. The final slide please. So going back to the network more broadly, this slide shows some information about how to join the conversation and access recordings of previous network meetings. And we can share these links in the chat afterwards. But throughout all of this, the contemporary collecting group network and the Slack channel have provided space for colleagues to share ideas, resources and learn from one another. And this is regardless of position, whether it be senior level at a huge organisation or a sole museum working in a small independent museum. And ultimately the network has provided a space for colleagues to care for and support each other through arguably the most complex mass collecting activity in the history of museums and archives. Thank you and we'll be happy to answer any questions that you might have later on. Thank you so much, Imogen. A fascinating presentation and incredibly timely. And I think what's interesting, what you've created there is obviously was created at a very specific point in time, but it's actually got immense relevance for across everything that we collect. Can I check first of all that am I right in thinking that the toolkit is available on the Collections Trust website if anybody would like to pick it up? Yeah, I can put a link but you can find it via the Collections Trust website or the London Transport Museum site. I'll pop a link in the chat. First question is very much around. Obviously you've been very closely involved in the network. If you could just explain what you've got out of being part of that network. Ellie, would you like to enlighten us first? Sorry, I was just googling. I never have the link handy. So for me, I think it's been really practically useful. It's been really good to get a sense of how we can collect distinctively at the Transport Museum as we all go through and take action in this moment. So it's been very practical. It's made me aware of issues and approaches that I might not have known about to consider and it's given me insight and my colleagues insight into people who are much further along in working through those issues and have different structures in place already for enacting those processes of care and consideration. So there's been a lot of practical organisational support there as well as setting a framework for how we can contribute individually. And also personally it's given me something really positive to focus on and I've found it a source of terrific emotional support just to know that we are all trying to do this together and to know that it's I think that this year could have felt like a very competitive prove your worth. Everyone's being made redundant. We're all terrified sort of the year. But for me, this network has been a bit of a reprieve from that as we've all tried to help. I feel like I've received a lot of help along the way. So a real mixture of things for me. Yeah, thank you. Eleanor, you're nodding very firmly there. Just a similar experience for you sounds like. Yeah, I think it's really been having that supportive environment, which can sound a bit like actually I think has been really important when everyone's working from home and can feel quite isolated in the work that they're doing. And sort of I suppose in some ways dropping your professional veneer a bit and going into a more informal setting where you are talking to colleagues at different levels from different places across the country or across the world. But you're also admitting that you don't know what you're doing and that you're struggling or that things are hard. And I think that openness and honesty has actually been really helpful in working through some of the really difficult things that we're trying to collect and achieve and also sort of releases that burden of responsibility. I think you sort of saw with the flurry of sort of activity that was going on on the Slack channel in those in that early period, but people were sort of very desperately like seeking those answers and wanting to engage and think just having that space to do that provided a lot certain it did for me. Imogen, we've got an interesting question here, a vital question about, you know, as was discussed about and sort of stepping outside your institution and working with other institutions and a key question. Have you any tips for getting institutional support for this into institutional activity? Well, that's a really good question, isn't it? I think it's tricky to say because from the Science Museum point of view, very early, as I mentioned, we created this advisory panel. I think through doing that, we kind of showed the importance and the kind of gravitas of what we were trying to do and that really brought in a lot of support internally. And I think something we did because the Science Museum is part of the Science Museum group, which is a five museums. It's actually led to loads of cross-site working in a really positive way and I think immediately because it was a shared project across these sites because there was buy-in across so many sites as well. It just became a really huge project and for that reason it meant that we did have a lot of kind of support from higher up really. I mean, Eleanor or Ellie, have you got any thoughts on that? I mean, it leads on to a question I had that was sort of around does collecting in something which is so immediate and so universal in this experience actually increase your profile both with your stakeholders and with audiences or indeed depositors you would like to connect with, you know, does it ease up conversations? And in that, you know, how can you sort of leave that to get that institutional support? I could answer sort of going back to the first part of that just to say that with the sort of institutional boundaries and working together. I think there was something about speed at which everything was happening that we needed to respond in quite an agile way and that everything sort of developed quite organically. Coming from a large institution which is naturally bureaucratic because of its size. If this had been set up as a formal partnership, I can imagine it being a much more lengthy process, but this was all sort of coming out of people just speaking to each other and needing to do something. And there was a need for that sort of speed and to act in quite a quick way to sort of set up a platform for working together. But I don't know if that answers on the institutional support, although I know Ellie did more thinking around sort of the kind of funding, like funding for the group and stuff like that. Ellie, would you have a brief answer that before we move on to Henry? Yeah, I guess the thing to reiterate is that actually it avoided a lot of duplication. It meant that we could quickly make connections between individuals who might be working on similar areas and make sure that, you know, and it was also, it's so informal at this stage that it's incredibly light touch. So there's not a great deal to do. And I think for us it's quite easy to make the point that what we can do is really distinctive now because we're informed about what else is going on. And I think our senior leaders really responded to that. Can I just ask just very quickly before we move on to Henry? The network is still in existence and people can still join it. Just got just got one question about the legacy of the network, but it's still there. It's going to keep working and not so much legacy is ongoing work by the sound of things. Yes, our aspiration is to continue to support the sector in this work in the future and use this moment to make sure lessons aren't forgotten. Well, I think your membership might go up after this afternoon. So thank you very much all three of you for a fascinating conversation. And I shall now move on to our second case study, which is Henry Roberts from the National Library of Scotland. And he's going to tell you, tell us about the National Library's climate action plan, which was the library's initiatives to become more sustainable organisation and use its collections to actually inform the Scottish public on climate crisis. And to help coordinate the action plan and influence its content, the library hired Henry, who's actually young climate activists. So following the tradition of DCDC, it's not just curators and archivists talking to each other. We bring in other professionals as well. And he's going to speak about the rationale behind the library's climate action plan before moving on to its content. So I'm going to hand over to you now, Henry. There we are. So thank you very much for inviting me here. So I'm going to be talking about the National Library of Scotland's climate action plan, which touches on every area of the library from collections to conservation to the day-to-day running of the estates. The climate action plan will take us to 2025, but it has an overall vision of the library becoming a net zero circular organisation by 2045. So there is that long term vision there. Briefly about me, I was brought into the library in October of last year to help shape and coordinate this piece of work. And as I'll touch on at the end, coming into a centuries old organisation as a young climate activist was at times frustrating, but I hope I managed to inject some urgency into the process. So I'm going to speak about the rationale behind us pursuing this work before going over the steps we took to write the documents. I'll then very quickly draw out some of the highlights from the action plan and the next steps we intend to take before discussing some of the things that could have gone better. And then finally ending by taking a step back and considering what roles library should play in a world in crisis. But first the reasoning behind the plan. I don't think I need to spend too much time going over the obvious rationale. We all know the destruction being wrought on our world. You've seen the same images of burning landscapes, flooded cities and swirling hurricanes that I have. But you will have also seen the mass civil society demonstrations. School students to retirees taking to the streets across the globe, demanding that governments take immediate and significant action to halt emissions and prevent the worst effects of the climate crisis. But there was an internal rationale to act as well as many of the audience will already know the victims of climate change are not just ecological as risk from increasing temperatures humidity and flooding rise. So to the do the risks posed to our collections to Scottish cultural memory so taking a proactive and defensive action to safeguard our collections was in the organization's best interest. And climate action also fed into the national agenda. Following the declaration of a climate emergency by Nicola Sturgeon in 2019, Scotland up to their national climate targets pledging to becoming net zero by 2045. To help achieve this targets public bodies in Scotland like the National Library are expected to play that part publicly declaring the year they intend to reach net zero as well as doing their best to becoming sustainable and circular themselves. But this is all already formally reported to the government so why the need for a public facing climate action plan. The answer is to make the policies understandable and to put them in context, both for our staff, as well as for our audiences. The structure of the plan mirrors the Scottish climate change duties for public bodies so the document is therefore divided with sections on mitigation, adaptation, sustainable development and wider influence. But we were also influenced by other external publications. We made sure to reference the Scottish National Performance targets, as well as the UN Sustainable Development Goals. Additionally, we felt compelled to reference relevant climate legislation, both national and international, such as the Climate Change Act for Scotland and the Paris Agreement for the global community. Again, not only did this help shape our own thinking, but by presenting the actions in this way we contextualized the work for our readers, be they members of the public or members of staff who weren't directly involved in the writing of these policies. So first the process, what were the steps we took to get here? Really quickly, the process went a bit like this. First, the research period. This was done by me and involved researching what other climate action plans looked like, both from the cultural heritage sector, but also from other places like universities and even the private sector. Next, a task group within the library was established. This was made up of several people from across the library and was led by someone from the library's senior management team. As I'll go on to explain later, it's vital that these groups contain a representative cross-section from all levels of the organization. Here, I reported back the findings from my research and we discussed what we wanted from the plan and our vision for how the library should look in 2025. The third stage, consultation, consultation, consultation. As those of you who have tried to work in groups before, the inevitable next step is to break off into yet smaller subgroups. So that's exactly what we did. We split into four smaller groups, each one for each of the sections of the climate action plan. Each subgroup had three rounds of sessions, during which we envisioned where we wanted the library to be in 2045 and then work backwards to 2025 and then finally thinking through the steps and resources that would be needed to get us there. I chaired all 12 sessions and the debates we held there were illuminating and at times frustrating, particularly since they were all done remotely over teams. And the final stage, more consultation. Once I had gone away and written a draft of the climate action plan that we in the task group had agreed upon, it was time to share this with the wider library staff over our internal communication system, along with a feedback form for employees to feed in their questions, comments and concerns. After this consultation period, the draft went on to the senior leadership team, who then gave their own comments before a draft was formally resubmitted back to the library team for approval. After all those steps, which took place over roughly a six month period, we ended up with a climate action plan which will hopefully be released around September in the lead up to COP26. We ended up with over 80 actions to be implemented over the next four years so I obviously won't bore you by going over them here but some brief highlights from the plan are a net zero pledge for 2045, a 72.5% greenhouse gas emissions reduction target by 2025, obtaining data to better understand our indirect emissions via third parties, improving our sub metering capabilities to develop real time monitoring of our estates, electrifying the remainder of the library fleet, updating our procurement policy to ensure that the sustainability tool is used effectively, improving the remote monitoring and management of the library estates, I'm reducing the amount of waste we sent to landfill to just 5%. However, these all came from the first three sections, I want to take a few minutes here to speak about the final section on wider influence, for it's here we find the actions that overlap most strongly with the themes of this conference. This is what the public sees and it's this section that deals with our collections with events, workshops and exhibitions. At the climate crisis gets worse over the coming years we can play an invaluable role in improving climate literacy, and in building resilience in communities both practically and emotionally. Again there are many ways we can do this but I think three broad and overlapping categories of public engagement stand out. The first, collaboration, collaborating with other organisations both within the cultural heritage sector, but also civil society groups to maximise our work. The second, curation, picking the most appropriate titles when choosing materials to intake and curating and displaying them in the most helpful way to the general public. As I'll speak about later on, this means not only focusing on the science of climate change, but also its social, economic and moral aspects also. And the third, collection, choosing what to collect. This will be aided by the collaboration aspect I just mentioned, proactively outreaching to civil society groups for instance to collect materials from them to help document and archive people's response to the climate crisis. We're currently planning on the various ways we can collect materials from COP26 happening this November in Glasgow. The work included in the wider influence section has the most potential to reach audiences and inspire change at the local level. Here is a chance to educate the public, but more importantly to give individuals the tools to conduct their own research both formal and informal into the climate crisis. Going forward then, there are two key areas of work which I think need to be prioritised in the library's public facing climate work, a diversity of audiences and a diversity of topics. The first speaks to what I've just said about collaborating and proactively reaching out to new audiences. We could have the greatest climate collections in the world, but it would be no good if they were restricted to the same audiences we always rely on. There are people far more qualified than me to speak on this, but it's worth making the point that active efforts should be made by the library and by all organisations to proactively engage with those on the frontlines of the climate crisis. These most affected people are often ethnic minorities and those living in the least affluent areas of society. Libraries, particularly centuries old institutions, can seem like intimidating spaces and engaging with libraries may not be the most obvious thing people jump to in a time of crisis when there isn't already a pre-existing relationship there. So time and money should be spent on reaching out to new audiences. On this point, in order to build resilient communities, everyone has to feel welcome in the library, so ensuring that the buildings are accessible to disabled and neurodiverse audiences is essential. Climate work and outreach and inclusion work should not be seen as separate. The second relates to the kind of topics we choose to promote. As a legal deposit library, it's not for us to turn down materials we don't agree with. Our archive is full of materials we don't agree with, but we do have agency when it comes to choosing what we choose to actively promote, be it through events and exhibitions or through our online presence. And here I think the language of climate justice is so important. Even the most alarming scientific data doesn't tell a person the whole story. It won't say anything about the power dynamics between the global north and the global south and between affluent and poorer areas within countries. It won't say anything on the racial and gender disparities of the climate crisis. It won't say anything about the historical inequalities that are entrenched in modern-day climate politics. That is to say that that's not to say that we shouldn't include scientific texts, of course, but only that we have to ensure that social texts are represented also to better understand the wider implications of our present ecological crisis. We wouldn't be reflecting the severity and the complexity of climate change justly if we focus all of our attention on just the science of climate change. We have to look at its social implications also, how the climate crisis intersects with race, gender and class. And related to both of these points, we have to ensure that the materials, events and services we offer cater to a diversity of knowledge levels. It's no good if we provide an extensive library of just academic texts. If we're to build resilience in communities, this information has to be understandable. And that means offering materials for the layperson as well as for teenagers and for children, those most inspiring of climate activists worried about their future. So as well as buying materials from Springer and Cambridge University Press, we need to offer workshops, relevant events and other non-textual materials to audiences such as maps, sounds and videos. This is all going to be implemented over the next four years, and I'm about to go on to the next steps we'll be taking to achieve those goals. But quickly, here's a really brief rundown of some of the things we have planned for the remainder of this year. Firstly, we'll be touring our living proof film. This is a film made up from our moving image archive, which explores Scotland's historic relationship to industry and nature. We'll be putting on a climate focus collections discovery. This is a curated reading list on our website, which again will speak to the diversity of topics I just mentioned. Our maps collection offer a visual representation of the effects of climate change both in Scotland and around the world. We'll be offering workshops on how to develop your research skills so that you can engage with the library yourself to find what you're looking for. And we're looking at the various ways we can engage in COP26 happening later this year. So that was a really brief look at the rationale behind the plan, the steps we took to produce the documents and some of its key contents. Now let's take a look at some of the next steps. The most important thing is to ensure that this plan does not end up in a draw, somewhere forgotten. And that's why it's vital that staff at every level feel included. The importance of collaboration at the planning stage I spoke about at the beginning of the talk will really be demonstrated here. The 80 or so actions won't be implemented by magic. They need people to carry them forward, and that means people understanding and supporting them. So having a cross section of the organisation on board from the beginning is essential. The best climate action plans will be a meeting of bottom-up enthusiasm with buy-in from senior management. And as I'm sure many of you will appreciate, this isn't the easiest or the most natural of marriages. To get senior management on board, it sometimes means talking in their language. I believe this climate action plan to be the right step for the library for moral reasons, but it also makes financial sense. Despite some short-term costs buying new technologies and adjusting to new systems, a more efficient and circular operation will start saving the organisation money quite rapidly. So knowing your audience is important, as is knowing when to talk about morals and when to talk about money. Once again, a climate action plan, as with any cultural change, cannot be a wholly top-down process. And to this end, we're creating a digital platform, a sustainability news hub on the library's internal communications site where employees will be able to see the library's energy stats, well-being resources and external opportunities to get involved in. But they'll also have the chance to add in their own content. For example, if they see an external event they think staff might be interested in, they'll be able to post that on the sustainability hub. Again, providing an opportunity for staff to feel included and to feed into the library's ongoing climate actions. And finally, the plan will undergo a formal review in 2025, at which point it will be renewed to take us further, presumably to 2030. So, really quickly, that was how we wrote our climate action plan. I'd like to spend a couple of minutes just talking, reflecting on some of the things that went wrong in order to understand them and do better in the future. From the moment I joined the library, it was clear that people were excited to take part in this initiative. People were glad to finally have a forum to voice their ideas. But for all the ambition, there was also fear, fear of being too pushy, going too far, rustling too many feathers. In part, this is a characteristic of the organisation itself. National libraries tend to think in centuries and not years, and those centuries tend to be looking backwards, not forwards, and so there will always be those voices who don't see climate action as falling into the organisation's purview. The point of this conference is to discuss ways glamour organisations can be catalyst for change. We all know the potential, as well as the difficulties here. Libraries may suffer a reluctance to be proactive, but libraries can and should be proactive, as I'll touch on just at the end. But it's not just libraries or even glamour organisations that may face problems. We all know the problems that come with organisations generally. The bigger the place, the more difficult it can be to get things done. There are always traditions, ways of doing things that employees don't want to break with. And even if you get your climate action committee up and running, there's always the risk of groupthink. There's always budget competitions. There are always other initiatives competing for attention. There's always the temptation of putting it off until next year. But the temptation to wait until next year will always be there. It will still be there when the world stumbles into irreversible climate disaster. However, these are still problems specific to the library, but we don't live in isolation. It's worth noting the limitations that stem from the fact that we're a single organisation. The climate crisis is a global problem, one that is geographically and temporally complex and porous. We are just one organisation with a limited budget working within a country with a certain energy system. We can only work within our limitations. And a lot of what we would want to do is not down to our own determination, but down to external forces beyond our control. For example, the requirement to reach net zero. With our current assets, we can't reasonably reach net zero anytime soon. It would mean buying masses of external land on which to offset our emissions. That's an unreasonable expectation for the library to take and for most public bodies in Scotland, hence why we placed our target at the furthest available year. Likewise, until the government decarbonises the grid, we're always going to be using some kind of non-renewable energy. So this at times feels demoralising, realising that we couldn't make all the sweeping changes which we'd ideally want. But I hope that by writing the climate action plan that we could achieve, we'll inspire others to do likewise. And thereby increase the volume of the climate conversation, which in turn may lead to more urgent action being taken in the corridors of power. Taken together, these problems lead me to conclude that getting people on board early and speaking their language are vital to achieving your goals. Compromise is inevitable, but some actions are too important for compromise. And there are certainly some disappointing moments for me personally working on this plan. But knowing where these potential pitfalls are may help you understand how best to navigate them. Should you choose to embark on similar work in your own organisation, be it climate-related or otherwise, I just have one minute left. I know it's ever so slightly over, but this is the last section. Before I finish, I want to take a step back and talk about libraries and the climate crisis more broadly. I've been talking about a case study, but case studies shouldn't exist in a vacuum. Libraries, archives, museums, we play an interesting role in the power-knowledge relationship. With sites of knowledge, that gives us influence and responsibility to educate the public on the various strands of the climate crisis. In a time of crisis, one may question the value of a heritage organisation, indeed of a library. But libraries are not powerless. Libraries can help build resilience in communities, both practical and emotional. Both will need to be addressed as the climate crisis gets worse and worse as the years march on. We can give people the tools to think critically and to build that resilience at the local level. Crucially, it's not just about providing resources, but helping users understand how to research and engage with those resources themselves. We should remember what I consider to be one of the inherent responsibilities of libraries in our society, to enable communities they serve to live without fear. Coming into the library as a young activist was at times a challenge. I wanted to move as fast as lightning. The library moves with the slow tides of history, generally taking the long-duray view of history. But libraries can be proactive. They should be at the forefront, building resilient communities, protecting the past from erasia, but also paving the way for a robust and informed future. Thank you so much. I think I went over, Silo, so a sincere apologies for that. No, that's very important message you've got there, Henry. Thank you very much. I mean, fascinating to talk to. I think one thing that comes to mind for me is, you know, the NLS is very lucky to have their own Henry. And, you know, other organisations, smaller organisations will not have their own Henry. Now, you know, as GLAMs, we, we not climate experts. So what would be your advice on in terms of, you know, any organisation, we all want to tackle this. What do you think of those ground level, those key things that any organisation could start tackling without, you know, knowing necessarily very much about the true science and the impact of what actions can lead to? Well, I think as I try to say throughout the talk that active engagement, which should be going on anyway, I think this is obviously each organisation has its own, has its own agendas, but like we say, this is, we would think a universal thing that every organisation should be taking on in future. So I think by talking to the right people and by doing your research, looking at what other organisations are doing. This is, if you can believe it, I was actually wanting to talk even more, but I cut some slides down because I realised I was going to go on. I had a slide on top tips and one of them was essentially being, yes. Are you able to bring that up Henry? Oh, I'm so sorry. I haven't. I'm so sorry. But one of the top tips was essentially no when to be bold, but no when to steal. A lot of this climate action plan wasn't original. I, in that initial research period, and you do this when you can look at the research yourself and you look at other climate action plans, there's a lot of overlap. And so that kind of does the work for you in the sense of pointing you in the right direction, telling you the things you need to go, the areas you need to go. So I think doing your research and looking at other organisations, for example, will just help cut time and resources doing that. But also that collaboration really speaking to the people who are involved and most affected and asking them what they want. Because, you know, we can spend a lot of time thinking, OK, well, what kind of resources can we have? What kind of resources can we bring in? What should we do? But sometimes the easiest thing to do, both in terms of time and money, it's just to speak to the audiences you want to engage with and say what's going to be most helpful for you. And again, that's going to save us quite a few steps. Yeah. And you talked about you had, you know, you went in hoping to change everything and then you realised you were up against this sort of them off of an institution, which is inevitable with all longstanding large institutions. But you said you had some non-negotiables and I'm just interested to know what they were, the ones where you said, no, this really matters. It was really important for me and I actually said this. I think I said this in my interview even before I got the job. I think it was really important for me to put the language of climate justice into the plan. And that might seem like a bit of a symbolic step, which might not mean anything. And it is a symbolic step, but I think there is importance there. So in the introductory section, like any big publication organisation, there's obviously long introductory sections, one of which I wrote, and that talks about the language of climate justice. That was really important for me for the reasons I spoke about in the talk, in that it's not just an ethical point. It would be an inaccurate point, I think, to talk about climate change and not address those social issues. Again, I'm really scared I'm sounding as if I'm dismissing the science. Of course I'm not dismissing the science. I'm just trying to put across the fact that the whole point of science is subjective and limited in what it says. But if you want the whole story of climate crisis, there's some uncomfortable truths there about power dynamics both within our country and across the world. So it was really important for me as the young climate justice activist to come in and try and get that language in and I was quite happy that that went in. In just in terms of what was in the plan, a lot of it was kind of determined for us based on those national legislations I mentioned at the start. For example, the net zero pledge, we had to put that in, even though we knew that given our current sets of circumstances we couldn't reasonably do that. It was a legal requirement for us, so we had to put something in there on that. There are a few aspects of that, but I think in terms of the more ethical moral points, just having the National Library of Scotland put that in writing, I think we'll hopefully send a message that we take the larger, more holistic view of what the climate crisis actually means for people. Yeah, and were there any key points that stick in your mind where, you know, as you say, everybody wants to do something, we all recognise the urgency of this. Were there any key points where sort of the urgency versus what you had to do was just too much, you know, that there were just some things that the institution said that that's too far for us? I mean, I mean, there were certainly frustrating moments every single day. I get in terms of, it was never a case of saying it was actually about the why, but so we, because we're a national library, we're funded by the Scottish Government, there was a fear of seeming to be too activist, too political, which is of course very fair enough, we're funded by public money. Of course, my argument is that this isn't political, this is a moral case, but I understand those, some objections there. But there were also, and again, as I hopefully touched on in the talk, the library has about 250 employees. No one really disagrees that climate change isn't important, but so is the Equalities and Diversity agenda, which was going on, so are the exhibitions that people have been working for literally years. They've been going on. There were a lot of things drawing people's attention, so quite a lot of times people were saying, that sounds really good, we just don't, where's the time? Where's the money? And I guess it was just a point, and this obviously came up throughout the six months, and if fair enough, so I think it was a point of really keeping on, keep sticking at the arguments to find, well, which are the ones which can be dropped and which were the ones that just have to be dropped. I'll give an example, I think, so one of the highlights I brought out was, was developing ways to get, understand our indirect emissions via third parties a bit better. That's still going to happen, but the initial target which I wanted was far more concrete and far more, we're going to say in our third party contracts, but if your emissions are not, you know, X, Y, Z, then we're not going to engage with you. And they said, we cannot do that if you want this to publish this year. I guess that's the kind of key point, forgive me if this is a bit of a circular answer. There's 80 actions across the, across the plan, and they touch on every level of the organisation. A lot of those actions, and this will be free for you to read, like I say in a few months time. A lot of these actions are, we'll develop ways, we'll think about ways, we'll put in place a plan, because essentially a lot of these plans are works for individual departments. If we had to get everything concrete at this point before publication, it wouldn't have taken six months, it would have taken five years, you know. So, in a way, it was more prompting each department to, okay, these are the areas you need to be thinking about, putting in a set of work, and then putting in, and then once we publish it, pushing them in the right direction. So that's why I spoke about the next steps and the importance of having that by and early, so hopefully they can actually carry this through in the next few years. Did that answer your question? Sorry, there's a bit more. And I think that's a very interesting point you got there, by the very action of publication, you are putting a line in the sand for the institution, even if you don't know what you're going to do next.