 I'm very pleased to welcome Daniel Payne as the speaker for today's event. So Daniel is the Politics Curator at LSE Library. He currently works on engagement work with the Archives and Special Collections, working on exhibitions, archive workshops and connecting people with the Archives and Special Collections. And he's going to share with us today a project he's been working on to help raise the profile of so-called hidden parts of the collections in response to an analysis of Library's flagship collections. So over to you Daniel and look forward to have a conversation after your presentation. Okay, yeah, so thanks very much for coming. So I'm going to talk about our projects I've been working on over the last couple of years. I'm going to try and do a mix of like restarting it whilst also reading notes at the same time. So we'll see how that kind of plays out. So I'm going to talk about three things. The first is to introduce you to Ambedkar, Bimraal, Ramji and Bedkar, who some of you may have heard of or some of you may not. And then secondly, I'm going to talk just a little bit about some thoughts I have about the way we present our collections, our archive collections in particular to the world. I was preparing for this talk and thinking that I might have possibly overthought this section a little bit. But then when we get to the third section, I'm going to try and give 10 practical suggestions for how to work with hidden collections. So hopefully it should be worth it in the end if you stick around. So I'll move straight to the first section and introduce you to Ambedkar. So this is a photograph of a bronze bust of Ambedkar, who's on display in a campus building at LSE where I work. And this was donated to LSE in the 1950s by the fabulously acronymed BABO, which stands for Federation of Ambedkarite and Buddhist Organisations. So Ambedkar was born in 1891 in India to a poor family and was part of the Dalit community, which is historically and pejoratively been referred to as the untouchables, considered to be so low in the social hierarchy, so as to sit outside of the caste system. And because of that, he suffered extreme discrimination and segregation throughout his life. He's talked about it in lots of different places, but he speaks about how the touch of a Dalit person can be seen to be polluting and how at school he wouldn't be allowed to drink from the same water fountain, for example, and he spent his life campaigning for the representation and rights of Dalit communities. If you're interested in reading a bit more, some of the stuff he's written, I recommend Annihilation of Caste. It's quite a short text and it's quite a sort of readable text if you wanted to sort of weigh into his thinking. Later on in life, he started studying different world religions to see if there was one that would be the most appropriate to convert to, to convert out of the caste system. And shortly before his death, he converted to Buddhism and many people today still convert to Buddhism in his name. And so that's why we have the bust from fabos of Mark and Bedkar's connection to Buddhism and the LSE. The LSE connection is that he came to study here in 1916. This was he was a ridiculously well qualified person. So he already had a doctorate from Columbia, Columbia University when he came here to register for the master's degree. He simultaneously registered at Grazin to study for the legal bar practice course. His master's degree here was interrupted because the terms of his scholarship meant that he had to go back to India. And he sent his some of his library and possessions and some of his master's degree thesis in a separate boat. And that got torpedoed by a German submarine. So he lost a lot of his work and possessions and some years later, then came back to the LSE to do a doctorate, a PhD and technically a DSC. Don't ask me what the difference of those are. I'd started to read it up and I don't fully understand it now. But he got his PhD here called the problem of the rupee. So it's a technical thesis about and currency and we have a copy with a handwritten dedication from Ambedkar. So it reads to Professor Edwin Cannon, his supervisor, as a token of sincere regards and gratitude from this pupil, the author. So that was 100 years ago this year. So as well as we have the bust, we have that portrait. Sorry, we have the bust. We have that PhD thesis and we have this portrait, which was donated in the 1970s. You'll see in his left hand, there's a copy of the Indian Constitution. So as well as campaigning for Dalit rights and representation, he was also a legal scholar and is known as the chief architect of the Indian Constitution. So he chaired the group of people that wrote the first independent Indian Constitution. So he did a lot of things. And I first encountered him when I started this job as a curator at the library, where I would start to get inquiries about him. From people just wanting to know what we had in our archives that spoke about him, because he was here for quite a few years and is such a significant and meaningful figure to lots of people and just people desperate to find traces of him in our collections and we don't have that much. And in fact, I had never even heard of him when I first received inquiries about him and I did what many library people do is that I would then research who he was and then reply as if I'd already always known exactly who I'm fed for was but consistently getting inquiries about it. And I became interested in the way when you are presented with these holes in your collection, these silences, is it enough to just sort of say there isn't really that much and just to end it there? And it was a kind of a question that sort of has a care to me, in particular in relation to and bedco. So now on to the overthinking section. So I often encounter in the reading room, a particular situation, which I think I put in the blurb of the talk. I think it's quite a sort of common comment from users of our archive collections. But I'll say something along the lines of why have you catalog this particular collection in this particular way? It doesn't make logical sense to me why the photographs by date it would be better for location because my research is looking at location, so it's not actually helpful. And we get this kind of comment from people. And that sort of led me to think a bit about how we present these archive collections. It's a really bad picture of a tree. I spent absolutely ages trying to find on the Internet a picture of a tree that is a trunk with three branches that sits off into three, that sits off into three and it does not exist. If anyone can find it, please email me. I even used AI to try and get it to construct a tree like that. And it wouldn't do it. So I gave up and drew this terrible picture. But just to sort of generally speak about it and to reiterate also that I'm not actually an archivist. I work with archives, but I'm not an archivist. So this is just my understanding of sort of archive cataloging. But the way archive collections are cataloged is a tree like structure and very hierarchical. So, for example, in our archives, we have the papers of George Landsbury. He was a labor MP in the 1930s. It's a quick picture of him in a nice hat on a motorbike. You have his papers. And so that represents sort of the trunk, the heart of the collection is the George Landsbury papers. And then everything else in that collection is cataloged in reference to the fact that they are George Landsbury's papers. So at the second level, our series of things that are in the George Landsbury papers at the third level are files, the things in George Landsbury papers. And then finally, number four are the individual items that appear in those files and everything sort of comes back to the fact that it's the George Landsbury papers. And it's a sort of obvious and also like cheesy point. But the researcher, they're not generally most of the time coming to look at the tree. Like most people don't want to come and like read the entirety of George Landsbury's papers. Instead, they're coming to look at the flowers that are kind of missing from this this tree, that are the leaves, the actual words that appear on those items. And this kind of tree like structure is to guide them towards it. But it doesn't actually appear on the catalogue. Likewise, it's not that the researcher comes to see all of the flowers on that tree, but they might need one flower from this tree, one flower from another tree, one flower from another tree. And so the researcher has quite a difficult task on that happens because they're presented with this structure, this tree like structure, which they have to sort of use to get access to it, whilst at the same time kind of deconstruct it and build their own structure that's based around their research question, if that makes sense. So it's not a critique of archive catalogue, but just pointing out an effect of it, which is that it's a bit of a double-edged sword essential for access, but can sometimes exclude the stuff that the person is actually looking for or makes it hard, makes it sort of sort of hidden, that kind of thing. So really, I was just mentioning that to say that I think engagement work is absolutely essential alongside cataloging work. The two have to work together in order to kind of expose these hidden collections. I know that when I sort of approach archive collections, I don't think of collections, I think of stories. And I think probably researchers also think of stories and probably most people who are not a library or archive person thinks about the stories that they're looking for rather than archive collections. Bless you, Alison. So it just got me thinking just a little bit about this kind of tree and what kind of effects this cause is and how it kind of hides collections in some kind of ways, but yeah, it's not very succinct, but just a few sorts of thoughts I was thinking about it. So I'm going to move away from the horrible tree to the third section where I'm actually going to talk about the projects that I've been working on, Traces of South Asia. So at its heart, the project is just simply a website on the library web page, which serves as a hub to share these stories that relates to South Asia, share engagement work and all the kinds of activities that I'm doing and in partnership with other people to help raise the profile of this particular hidden collection because we don't really have a South Asia collection as such. There's no kind of tree trunk that we can present to people and say this is the South Asia collection. So instead, this project is a sort of way of artificially constructing a collection that doesn't fit into a sort of normal structure. It's composed of lots and lots of different little bits and lots of different collections, not just archives, but spread about and within other people's papers, which makes them somewhat hidden because of their different structure. So here are just 10 things that I've been working on the last couple of years that I thought I would share. So the first is digitization. So we're lucky to have a digitization suite in-house in the library. And typically when we digitize things, I don't know if it's similar to other places, but in terms of selection, it's relatively straightforward. So we're going to digitize this person's papers, the George Lansbury papers. Then you just digitize all the papers or a particular series of journals or that kind of thing. But when it comes to hidden collections in South Asia, digitizing can actually bring together all these disparate little bits that appear in different collections and then bring them together into their own more visible collection, if that makes sense. So I've been working on a South Asia digitization project. The selection for it is a lot more complicated because it involves trying to follow threads of stories in lots of different places to give an example. This particular photograph is on the list for digitization. So this photograph comes from the papers of Agnes Maud Royden, who was a suffragist and campaigner for the movement for the Ordination of Women. And then it just happens that in her collection, there is this one photograph of her with Gandhi. So she's at the center. And then to her left is Aruna Asaf Ali, who was a very significant figure in the Indian independence movement. And to her left is Mira Ben, who's another very interesting person involved in the Indian independence movement. And I've shared lots of stories about her and kind of elsewhere. And her story, Mira Ben is explained a little bit more in another random place in our collections, actually in the George Lansbury papers. So instead of digitizing Agnes Maud Royden's all papers, they're just digitizing this one photograph and one item from somewhere else. And together they'll start to build a collection of stories that relates to South Asia and so become their own kind of, I don't know, artificially constructed collection rather than a sort of obvious collection of this person's papers kind of thing. And also because it's in lots of disparate places, not just focusing on digitizing archives, also other parts of our collection. So as a part of this project in our main collection, we have various government publications from South Asia. So we're digitizing some of those and there are some pamphlets in the women's library that relate to South Asia. So looking at all different parts of the collection and bringing them together to join the thread of different stories. That's digitization. The second thing is exhibitions. So it seems like an obvious thing to say, but an exhibition is a really great way of exploring hidden collections and helping to promote them. So this is an exhibition I did about journeys to independence, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Previously, we didn't really think of ourselves as a library that has anything that really spoke about South Asia. But if you follow the threads of different stories, you can just about bring enough that does actually create a meaningful story that people interact with. And I'd also say that to help with hidden collections, you don't have to focus an exhibition on pure archive items. I've got books from the main collection that are on display in that exhibition. I realized I needed a nice illustrated copy of the Constitution to sort of finish telling a story. So I just printed it off the internet and put it in a cabinet. So I think you can be quite. You don't have to focus on an exhibition thinking it has to be sort of pure, rare archives. And this was a really great way also to partner up with other people with your libraries attached to the university. So I partnered up with academics who are interested in this topic. So they really enjoyed getting involved in it, because it relates to their research. And I benefited from their sort of expertise, because I'm not a historian. So it's a really sort of great opportunity. And it had a really nice impact, this exhibition. I just read out some comments. So as an Indian at LSE, it's incredible that a non-British perspective is being presented. It makes me proud. I can't read it all now, because I'm covered up by myself. It makes me proud to be at LSE and be an Indian. The British Bangladesh, I found it emotional and heartwarming exploring this exhibition. And then my favourite comment is, thank you so much. I'm very good for everything. And then the name and eight years old. Also, I hope you had a good life reading and studying in the library. So I really like doing physical exhibitions. When I thought about this, I thought lots of people will say, oh, that's very well if you have a gallery space, lots of people won't have a gallery space in their library. As well as doing quite simple pop up exhibitions, I actually think you could do an exhibition on a blank wall. If your library has a wall, I assume it does. I think you can do an exhibition. An exhibition does not have to be some enormous British museum affair if you have a wall that you can stick some pictures and some text and in some way make it interactive or a way for people to respond to it, which could just be organising some event related to it. In my view, at least that counts as an exhibition. So there are sorts of low budget ways to do it that don't involve having to have a gallery. And you can call it an exhibition, I think. And yes, that's everything they've got. Exhibitions, online exhibitions. So I really like doing online exhibitions as well because they're relatively easy to do. We're on three so far related to South Asia where we've shared some of the stories in the collection and helped to raise the profile of these collections. So on the left, I did one called Educate, Agitate, Organise, which is all about ambiguous time at LSE. So I mentioned at the beginning, I felt a bit rubbish about just being, replying to people saying, well, there's just this bust, there's some administered files, that kind of thing. But now we have an exhibition where we've shared all of that material and then also written a kind of narrative story and kind of filled in some of the blanks. And so kind of, in a way, added a bit to the collection. So I think it's a really nice thing to be able to share. Likewise, my colleague, Gillian Murphy, on the right, she picked out some stories to do with women in South Asia. And in particular, did an exhibition about the Myrosad Brown Memorial Library. So previously, her name just appeared on some of the book plates in our collections in the Women's Library, but we didn't really talk about the fact that we had a Myrosad Brown Memorial Library. But now that Gillian has done this online exhibition, it's drawn out that collection and given it more of a profile. Again, I was thinking of people were listening to this, they might say, oh, I can't do an online exhibition because they need like a sort of jazzy website or like exhibition software or that kind of thing. But our online exhibitions are just they're just websites with picture and text. There's nothing particularly fancy about them in that regard. So it's it's if you've got the technical capability to do a blog post, you can do an online exhibition. I was also thinking people might think we don't have a digitization sweep, so we can't provide sort of good images for it. I would say that the forget about preservation when it comes to online exhibitions, it's not about preservation. It's 100 percent about access. So you could take a photograph on your phone of an object in your library or scan something, and that's fine as far as I'm concerned, because people are there to read their story and see these items. And then the other thing I thought people might say now I can't do an online exhibition is because they might say, well, I'm not like a curator. I don't know how to write text to sort of curate an exhibition. I actually meant to look at that beforehand and I forgot to do it. But I assume the word curator is related to the word care. So as long as you care about the thing that you're exhibiting, that's sufficient knowledge and skill to curate an online exhibition. So I think it's quite an easy thing to do if you have a great web editor. So and shout out to Andy Jack, who's our web editor, who's always up for kind of experimenting with the website to sort of help with engagement with our collections and the kind of thing. So our archives are open to everyone, as I think they are most libraries. Typically, someone will have to book an appointment or register fetch material and that kind of thing. So it's not quite as easy as just sort of wandering in, but they're open to everyone. In spite of that, I think lots of people when it comes to archives and even library collections in general, they might think that coming to look at this kind of stuff is the preserve only of a sort of proper academic or historian. And so just don't assume that they can come in and do that. So in my view, we can't just say things like everything is open. You can book an appointment. We also have to bring archives out to two people. So this is a photograph from an archive drop in. So it's quite a simple thing to organize and we do them quite regularly. We started doing them last year, I think, where we just get a bunch of stuff out from the archives on a particular theme. So I did one about South Asia for South Asian Heritage Month last year. This isn't a picture from that particular one. And then we just for three hours, we just advertise this informal just drop in if you're nearby and come and see it. And at the South Asia Heritage Month one, it was really popular. And I spoke to loads of people, the majority of which weren't sort of academics or people researching archives. They were just they'd never engaged with archives. We're interested in stuff to do in South Asia. And we're just really excited to sort of touch things. I think this was really kind of valuable experience that we're going to carry on doing. And last Sunday, it was the anniversary of Ambedkar's birth. It was his birthday, otherwise known as. And so I just again did a very similar thing where I just said, in the library, I'll get a few things out about him on a table, come in and see it. And literally hundreds of people turned up to come in and have a look at Ambedkar's material. It was a really like extraordinary event. And people like really I saw this child who asked me. I showed you that PhD thesis where they hadn't written dedication. He asked me, was that written by Ambedkar? I said, yes, it was. And he sort of climbed onto the desk and put his whole head in the thesis and just sniffed it, which I thought was like really cool. Yeah, it's it's a really sort of I think we have to bring archives out to not just help people access them, but bring them to people. Last Saturday, actually, so it was busy weekend, last weekend. I also tried to keep in touch with what's going on in the university that's attached to the library because chances are there will be some academic or student that's interested in the parts of your hidden collection. So I found that there was this conference going on with the InnoQualities Institute that partnered up with the University of Mumbai. And they were having a conference and I thought perhaps they'd be interested in some of this stuff. And then the whole conference came to the library to have a look at some of the stuff that I got out. So, yeah, bringing archives out is important, particularly with hidden collections to sort of help people know about them. This might be another example of overthinking. But I was thinking about the library and if you forget about collections completely and just think about the library as an entity like the physical and online library. Since the library has existed, there have been so many people that have spent time in the library, have passed through it, a student studying in it, someone popping into the toilet, a member of staff that's been there forever. There are just people that have experienced life there. Life has happened in the library. And there's absolutely no trace of that other than locked in the memories and possessions of those people that have passed through it and spent that time in the library. And unless that person ends up becoming very famous and decides to donate their archives to you, it's a kind of. I see that as a kind of a collection that the library has, kind of like the ultimate hidden collection of these people that have spent time in the library. And I think that that's something that we can engage with as a library. So to give a practical example, that's quite a necessary and I got this inquiry from someone in India whose father had recently died and they were sort of going through their possessions and trying to find out more about their father's life, which I think is what kind of quite often happens. And they knew that their father had studied their LSE. So they were asking, getting in touch with us to see if we had anything about it. And we had a kind of student file which have like his application form and a few bits and pieces in it. So I sent it to him and then he replied, I just had to move myself out of the way so I can read this. OK, I'll just read the second paragraph. So he replied to me saying his referring to his father. He said, his going to LSE has changed the lives of an entire generation and the second generation. Seeing a student file has brought my family a deluge of happiness. We can't wipe out tears enough. Our mom wants to touch these pages. I was really moved in particular by that last sentence. And I just ended up replying to him and chatting to him. And he started sending me like more pictures from his father's. This is a picture with his wife. And then I noticed that he was by sharing his memories, he was annotating the student file and sort of embellishing it and in a way, adding to the collection. So I asked him if he wanted to sort of share this more publicly. And so we co-wrote a blog post together where I kind of wrote a bit about the administrative documents and then he added his sort of layers of memories of what it was actually like for his father at LSE, not what the administrative record said. So the record would say, oh, he didn't turn up to class for six months or something. But then his son was saying, well, that was because he ran out of money, so he had to go and work in the post office so he can continue with his studies. So in a way that sort of added to the collection. So, yeah, I think seeing the people that have spent time in your library as a potential collection is something that I find interesting and it's something that I'm just sort of trying to explore. I'm just checking how long I've been talking for. OK, 1130. So I also think engaging in original research is a great way to expose hidden collections. So I was trying to see if there's anything more about Unbedca, like desperately trying to find more things. And because of my library and archive background, not because of my academic or historian background, I knew that archive catalogs often reproduce original terms that are found in documents that could be considered to be discriminatory or offensive today. So instead of searching for Dalits, which I'd done previously, I searched for Untouchable, found this letter from a director at the library about this previous student and it's an extremely long-winded story that's on the Traces of South Asia website. So I won't share it now, but I'd encourage you to read it. But in a very long-winded way, I ended up discovering a letter by Unbedca that we had in the collections that was otherwise hidden. So I think that was like a contribution to scholarship of the kind, because it's a new thing. And that wasn't as a result of being an academic, as a result of being a library and archive person. So I think we as library and archive persons are a different kind of expert on our collections and we can sort of contribute to scholarship and it's called the Sharing Hidden Collections. But yeah, I just recommend reading the exhibition. You'll understand a bit more about it. This one's quite a straightforward one, but organizing talks and public events that are related to the subjects of your hidden collections and then bringing those hidden collections to those events. So I mean, we've have a regular schedule of public events, but we're focused on doing quite a few events on topics of South Asia and just putting them on YouTube afterwards so that it all helps with them spreading the word about the collections. What your visitors do, so a little bit similar to the ghosts that I was talking about. People come to our library and use our collections and the vast majority of the time, they use them for whatever purpose and then you never hear from them again. Particularly with the archives, you'll only hear from them really if they took a photograph of something and they have a question about copyrights because they're gonna publish it in an article. But it occurred to me that there would be lots of people that have actually found these hidden collections and have been using them and we just don't know about them. So I thought about this randomly on a Monday morning and then just printed off a Word document that just said, hi, I'm Daniel, I'm interested in South Asia and who are using those collections, I'll have to chat about it if you're in our library using this stuff and just left it in the reading room and I had quite a few people get in touch with me about it. One guy who was doing his PhD in Switzerland, he was here in the archives reading room as a result of our traces of South Asia work because I had previously written a post saying, oh, inside this person's archives, you wouldn't think here, but actually there's quite a bit about the Bangladeshi diaspora in the East End and this person had read that and that was the subject of his PhD. So he came over to look at those archives and then from chatting to him, I then put him in touch with some other colleagues and then he wrote a blog post about it. So it was great for everyone because he got to sort of think out loud at a stage of his research and share about it and it just continues to help with sharing about these hidden collections and shows that they are hidden because this person doing a PhD just did not know that we had that stuff, but they now do. That's just a photograph from one of the items that he was looking at. So it's the papers of Peter Shaw and other labor MP who's pictured on the left, but he took an interest in Bangladeshi independence movement and on the right is Bangapandu, the first, I think it's Prime Minister, not President, Prime Minister of Bangladesh. And then finally, not finally, and ultimately, training and resources. So on the traces of South Asia sites, just written a very simple kind of list of some collections that I've come across that relate to South Asia just to sort of get it out there. I do think one thing to be interesting to explore is these people that come to look at the stories and come to research our archives. I don't think it's enough to give like a sort of how do I search guides? Like how do you enter terms into this field and that kind of thing? I think actually they need to know a bit more about sort of intellectually how collections are organized and how they're presented to them because as we've discussed, that's how they can sort of help find things. So there's something on kind of training and exposing the work of the cataloger to the user of the archive that I think would be worth exploring. And then just finally being public about it. So I mentioned Andy Jack, he was very up for just doing a website, our web editor, and then we just sort of add stuff to it and think out loud about it. So he explained on the website what we're trying to do and if anyone has any suggestions to sort of get in touch with us. I wasn't brave enough to do like a live website demos, this is just a screenshot of the top of page and I know you can't click that link, but if you Google LSE library traces of South Asia, you'll be able to find it. But yeah, that's the webpage. And then I'm not really sure what to do next with it, which is why I thought it'd be really interesting in the discussion if people had suggestions for other ways to raise the profile of hidden collections and how to sort of let people know about them. I'm quite interested in oral histories because of some of the things I've talked about, people's kind of memories is quite an interesting collection to grow and sort of add to the holes that might appear in hidden collections. And then radical access as well. So much of what the researcher ends up seeing is in a way controlled by us because there's the catalog that controls it, there's how many items they can fetch per day when they come here that controls it, they're opening hours, all this kind of thing, which are kind of then necessary, but they also serve to keep collections hidden, which are already kind of physically hidden because they're locked in a store. So there's something about accessing archives that I think isn't important to think about with regards to hidden collections, but I'm not quite sure what. And yes, I just think I spoke very quickly. But yes, that was everything I wanted to mention. I'm really happy to chat about it if anyone wants to email me in the extremely unlikely event. Anyone's on mastodon. I put my mastodon username on there. But yeah, thank you for listening. Thank you, Daniel, that was great. I think the idea of trying to find different ways to surface the stories that exist in your collections is really appealing. There's some questions come in on the chat, one of which was when you were putting together your exhibitions online or in person, were you able to include different voices, different perspectives in your description of the objects? Yeah, so I was consciously when doing exhibitions tried to get the voices of the people who the objects are about to speak. So I'm often ending up being the sort of coordinator, but the text is often written by other people. So yeah, it's something I sort of consciously try to do with exhibitions, I think it's important. And also to get, sorry, also for the visitors to the exhibition to also add their voice to it, there has to be a mechanism for that as well so that you're not presenting this sort of authoritative narration of events, but people can add to it and bring their own perspectives. And when you're doing that, not necessarily the visitors, but when you're doing that in advance the preparation of a piece of engagement work, how do you identify the community to involve in that descriptive work? And perhaps also, how do you manage the kind of almost built-in power imbalance that you're the curator and you have a lot of the power over these collections? How do you manage that? Yeah, it's a huge thing. So the Ann Bedka online exhibition, for example, I partnered up with the Decolonizing Collective and academics from and who also write about South Asia. It is true that it's inescapable that the curator yeah, it's difficult because I don't think there is a solution to that that resolves it. There's no way to you have to sort of be aware of that power that you do inevitably have. For example, with the Journeys to Independence in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh exhibition, I was very aware that a lot of the archives that we have are the archives of British people based in the UK that contain stuff about South Asia, but it's not the archives of people who are in South Asia. And so that's the kind of sort of power structure that I think one way of dealing with it is just to reveal that. So at the exhibition, I had a huge poster that prefixed everything that pointed this out and encouraged people to think, like, what is the effect of the facts that we're telling this story, but with these archives that come from a British perspective, there might be other solutions to doing that, but I think being honest and self-aware of it and sort of sharing that in the exhibition is part of it. Yeah. One of the other questions that came up is a more practical one, which is given these archives are fairly modern in quite a lot of terms. Did you have any copyright or permission problems when you wanted to put some of this material up online? Yeah, so with copyright, we take a risk-managed approach. So we sort of have a takedown policy. So if anyone is getting in touch with the original copyright holder, we would, by default, take it down. It's, we tend to avoid doing exhibitions on much more recent themes because of the increased risk. So it tends to be older stuff like early 20th century. But yeah, I would say we take a sort of risk-managed approach. We don't necessarily try to identify the copyright owners of every single thing that we put online and try and ask permission because it's not practically possible. And yeah, we have one of the things that makes that risk-managed approach possible is that it's supported by the sort of library leadership team. They're prepared to take on a bit of risk. We do a full copyright risk assessment when we do this kind of thing. And yeah. One of the other questions that's come up is this sort of tension between archival cataloging approaches, which I think you're sort of suggesting in some ways are contributing to keeping some of these collections hidden just the way that they're structured is contributing to keeping them hidden. And the question asked, is there anything we can do within the catalogs to embed some of the uncovering work or does it have to be outside that descriptive practice? I think so the long-winded second section was much longer which probably would have been better. But I think because the archivist has to provide a summary of what's involved in the items, it has to be a summary. And there's no avoiding the fact that when we summarize, we exclude. That's not a critique of it. It's just pointing out the effect that summaries exclude. And to give some examples, for example, I was looking at an archive collection that we had about the South Sea Company which was like a sort of ship trading. And I read the whole description and had to look at the files. And I had no idea until I researched separately that what it traded in was enslaved people but this was just not written in the description. And I think this is particularly true of collections that have been catalogued quite a long time ago. I think, sorry, I forgot what the actual question was. What can we do about that? Yeah, I guess how can we embed some of that opening up and covering work in our descriptive practice of archives? Yeah, so I feel like there's lots and lots of archivists already that sort of work on this practice. And I feel like I'm straying outside of my area but archivists do this work. Their main is they try to make sure that their summary descriptions are more inclusive. I guess it's just to say, it doesn't matter how inclusive your summary description is, it has to involve exclusion. So it's just pointing out that it's something that we have to work with. And I think engagement is one of the ways to do that, all the engagement activities that we mentioned. And I think you also mentioned that training, that building understanding in our users about the descriptive practices we use and how they might need to interact with them or interrogate to find what they're really looking for. Yeah, absolutely. I think researchers don't know how things are organized and I just think it would be enormously helpful if they did know. Yeah, one of the questions is asked about how to deal with a user who might be opposed to how a particular collection has been organized and might have other suggestions. I don't know whether there are examples of competing descriptions existing in the one catalog. Yeah, it's not something I've experienced. I mean, again, I don't do the actual practical work of cataloging. I tried it once and found it very difficult to do. But yeah, so I work on more of the engagement side of things. So it's not something that I've experienced. I think I'm sure there'll be archivists in the chat that could share that. Yeah. And I wanted to ask as well, you talked about, you know, this has obviously been a bit of work that's been going on. I think 2017 was the first exhibition, is that right? So it's been a multi-multi-year commitment to this work. Has it resulted in new collections coming to the LSE? Yeah, that's a good question. Not on the topic of South Asia, it hasn't. But our engagement work more generally, I mean, the activities that I've described are things that I also do with other collections as well. And they have absolutely led to new acquisitions. I think it's a bit harder with something like South Asia because the collections of people in South Asia doing work in South Asia will quite correctly reside in South Asia. But yeah, there's not, again, it could be the case that some of our acquisitions, it might contain like a one-off document that is something about South Asia. It's hard. There's no kind of South Asia donation if that makes sense. But our engagement work does lead to donations of various archives that might contain further stories about South Asia that are yet to be discovered. Actually, I suppose the information you gathered from the son of the graduate is part now of the institutional archive of LSE, as part of the record of what it was like to be a student. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, good. We did have a question about what software you used for your online exhibition. So no software. So it's a web editor. However, it's just a normal web page that there's no software. It's just a basic web page. So just like a blog post, it's text and pictures. And that's it. Yeah. And I wanted to ask us all about the sort of the radical access idea. Are you talking about that sort of sense of allowing people to try to engage with the archives outside of cataloging descriptions and outside or traditional. So basically come in and walk the shelves and browse amongst the material without the organizing structure of the catalog. Yeah. I mean, you mentioned power earlier on, because we have power in so many different ways, the way we describe collections and the way we enable access to them, even like saying we can fetch you just three items a day is an expression of power of some kind. And I'm not saying any of these things are unnecessary. There has to be some organization and getting access to archives. There are so many different ways in which we control what the person ends up seeing. And so I'm just arguing from outside the sort of, because I'm not involved in the sort of physical access kind of thing, but doing this kind of engagement work can perhaps help that a little bit. But yeah, it's a sort of open-ended thought. Like I'm curious to hear what other people think if there's any way that access to archives can be rethought about in a way that still enables them to be preserved. Yeah. Yeah, certainly at the National Library of Scotland, we've had some really interesting work doing co-curated exhibitions with community groups where it is the community that decides the story and decides the selection of material and the curators are meant to be the facilitators to that. But there is still that sense of, you're still having to be a bit of a gatekeeper, a bit of a facilitator. Yeah. There are places, I think like May Day rooms in London. There are places where the community that donates the archive are also the ones that catalog it or are involved in cataloging it. And I've mentioned all our histories as well. So what I've been interested in doing recently is when an archive collection is donated to us and it's been cataloged and organised, then do the oral history with the person that donated it, asking them what they think about the structure and how it feels like to be there. And that's kind of another way of sort of dealing with that control that we've now had over the collection is to sort of make sure that what is also recorded is what that donor thinks about all of that.