 Good afternoon and welcome to the British Library which is currently onto a very topical exhibition called Breaking the News which takes an in-depth look at 500 years of news in the UK right up to the present day. In this event today however we're looking beyond that UK focus with some British Library curators who are going to share their handpicked choices from their respective regions that speak to the themes of the exhibition. This will also give us a sneak peek behind the curating scenes something I'm really keen on doing which Library is full of such interesting people and this is your chance to find out what curators do all day what makes it a particular item stand out and anything else you'd like to know so please don't wait till the end you can just put your questions in the chat box anytime and we'll have a Q&A after my colleagues presentations I'm B Rollat of the cultural events team and it's my great pleasure to introduce to you some of my exceptional colleagues today's British Library All Stars. We have Yasuo Otsuka who's curator of Japanese collections, Hanlin Shi who's curator of Chinese collections, Ayo Darilo is curator for the Ethiopia collection and Mariam Dahan is curator of collections. Our first two speakers are a joint presentation that very cleverly shows the same story from two completely different sides so Yasuo I'm going to let you take over now. Thank you very much so if everyone can see yes there is a slide that's coming up okay hello everyone thank you very much for coming to our event I'm Yasuo Otsuka curator Japanese collection today we are going to present the the presentation with my colleague Hanlin Shi curator Chinese collection. The title of our presentation was a real fake news is nothing new so what we are going to do is we we are going to present two prints typically it's the same event of the Sino-Japanese war propaganda prints under the with the strong political bias from Japanese point of view and Chinese point of view so we are going to show you two prints from Japan and from China. Next one please. First of all I would like to explain you a little bit about our Sino-Japanese war prints in the British Museum. In total we have 235 prints and 179 printed in Japan by Japanese artist and 56 printed in China by Chinese artist. All the prints were acquired by the British Museum between April and October 1895. This timing is quite important because this is not long after prints were produced and then we think that was the evidence of the British Museum because these prints were important visual records of international conflict. Next slide please. So what is Sino-Japanese war? Sino-Japanese war was between 1894 to 1895 and it was broke out in July 1894 so it was the in-military rivalry between Meiji Japan and Chin China so it was on the bridge point it's the Meiji Japan BS Chin China it is. Resulting and this battle was resulting from political turbulence in Korea under the rule of E dynasty so the name of the war it was widely known Sino-Japanese war but actually battlefield was Korean peninsula. So I'm going to hand over this hand in as she's going to explain about the battle. Thank you Yasuya for the quick introductions to the Sino-Japanese war and now I'm going to give a little bit more background of the things that we are going to talk about is the battle of Julian Chen Julian cities. If we go to click on the map then we can see where the Julian city is located. As you can see it's more north China and near to the Korea as Yasuya just explained where the main battlefield was. A little bit about the story behind why this battle and how it went on. So the story is from the Chinese side the general two generals general Song Qing and general Liu Sen show. Both of them didn't really get well and so the order didn't go through mostly. If we click a bit of then we can see these two generals actually they as I just mentioned they are not getting well therefore the orders from the main general Song didn't really get through and then general Liu didn't get the main order and didn't follow. So as a result general Liu didn't went to the Julian city and protect the cities. In this case the Japanese army general Yamagata Aritomo he took the cities on 24th of October so the Japanese took the cities. Next slide please. A little bit facts conclude facts of these battles is Japanese army fully prepared to attack the city. However the Qing dynasty army had already left the city as I just explained the reason why. Therefore the very important fact to remember is Japanese army took the city without fighting and Qing dynasty army didn't attack the city. This is two main points that need to remember. Next slide please. And now I hand back to Yasuya to describe a bit more about the Japanese items. Thank you very much. This is a Japanese print produced by Japanese artist and the Japanese publisher. So you can see the title of this print is the Japanese army occupied Julian Chen. We made a great victory. So this is a battle scene of the imperial Japanese army fighting heroically and in the distance you can see the triangle flag that is indicated where the Chinese army was fighting against the Japanese army. But as Hanlin has just explained it never happened because when Japanese army approached the Julian Chen the Julian Chen was empty because Qing dynasty army had already gone. So this has never ever happened. So that's why we think this is a truly purely produced under the propaganda purpose to advertise how Japanese army was doing a great job and how bravely they were and kind of the heroic moment. To say about the imperial Japan is great but it never happened. Please remember this never happened. So this is a fake news. So Hanlin over the Hanlin to explain about the Chinese print. Okay so right now you can see from the Japanese items depict the historical events but which as well is not happened and not real. There are a few hints on this print also provide the evidence that these things didn't happen. So the first one on the title in Chinese is Ke Fu. In English we can translate it as retake. However as in the archive and recordings there is no these events happened. Chinese didn't retake the Julian cities. And the second so Danyao Wei Jie in Chinese are Autory Ketsuke. This name has been mentioned in the print. However this gentleman who was a high ranking diploma was in Japan during the time. Therefore how could he join the war? Therefore this is the second point that these things is not true. And then the third you can see there are a bit descriptions on the left hand side and according to the historical recordings there is no such descriptions. Therefore these three points gives the hint that this is a propaganda purpose printings which depicts a non-happened event. Next slide please. Therefore what we do with these prints? So as curators we carry out the research on the collections and do the research on various archive records. Next steps we provide the resources as you might receive the link for online websites that provide the resources including the British Library's items and some archive and recordings. This website was worked together with our Japanese partners. Japanese Center for Asian Historical Records. So we also worked with our partners to provide the resources to the general public. The last step is we will leave the public to interpret it. Therefore in concrete as Curator and the library we provide the items available to the public and we leave the interpretations to them. This is our presentation as our part. If you have any questions you can put your questions into Q&A box and now I'm hand over to my colleagues who will introduce the Ethiopian items to you. Thank you. Okay thank you very much. As you have seen in this exhibition Breaking News in 1984 a very important coverage of the Ethiopian famine was made by Mohamed Amin and Michael Burke. This reporting of the Ethiopian famine inspired Band-Aid to raise charity records money as well as being considered one of the most regarded as being a watershed moment in crisis reporting which to this day had a great influence. At that time the Ethiopian government was a communist government which just came to power in 1976 and the famine was considered in Ethiopia as as a cause by the the civil war and important newspapers and articles at that time were produced as well as posters to basically celebrate the first couple of years of the revolution I think four or five years and what that did was it created a great criticism especially from outside of Ethiopia. Next slide please. So just to give you some background before I go into our main poster that propaganda poster that I've chosen for this talk. The first picture that you saw is actually is from the Library of Congress which is a communist poster again produced between 1984 so the British Library has a vast amount of collections of items relating to Ethiopia and one of the areas that hasn't had a great attention that much as opposed to manuscripts is the modern printed books and particularly communist magazines and newspapers and books of that period. Next slide please. So I selected this as you can see a poster in a newspaper. This was for a special edition for a newspaper titled Sartoder which literally translates work the workers produced by the workers party of Ethiopia and this was again part of the celebration of the first couple of decades of the Ethiopian Revolution and important artists were commissioned to produce posters like this. This was particularly for the May Day festival that it was produced. As you can see the color used interestingly enough it's the red and black which is of course symbol of the red flag being the flag of the communists but at the same time red and black were cheaper to produce on newspaper. So the newspaper basically this poster that you see reads 1979 actually Ethiopia has a different calendar. We follow a different calendar so we are six years or seven years back so you will be seven years younger if you go to Ethiopia. So this poster has the word 1979 but it has a very interesting if you know if you look at carefully it's there's the English writing that says long live May Day and then at the bottom it's read Maserat for the Feet which is we should go forward and then it has Zab Yukum all must stand for the mother revolutionary motherland of of our country. I'm just trying to attempt to do a direct translation above that it reads very interestingly it reads it says to be self-sustained yourself in terms of food be strong and work hard for your country. Now this is a period where I said that there was a great famine and great civil war so this kind of a poster was produced interestingly enough not by the government itself but although the government was the workers party they attempted to show a positive image of Ethiopia and of course of the workers and a promise of a new a promise of a new future despite of what was going on until the end of the Cold War posters like these and newspapers and specially printed books were an important tool in both legitimizing the dictatorship the communist dictatorship then along with justifying again censorship because people weren't able to discuss what was happening openly so this this this posters did legitimize that but another positive aspect of such posters which I'm not able really to show you here since they haven't been photographed yeah we're also communicating public health during the famine many illnesses such as corolla and other illnesses emerged and these posters were again effective in communicating communicating these important issues in in sort of in a broader sense now the aim of the all propaganda poster is obviously influencing and in this case what they're trying to do is trying to influence people that the towards the communist cause which was you know this is a short-lived revolution therefore don't give up this is one message this is sending and it's also international despite the famine just to conclude posters like these and newspapers have become incredibly rare and extremely expensive the British library was fortunate as my predecessor did collect a number of these newspapers roughly we have seven seven seven seventy or eighteen newspapers of that period with amazing posters and important books like this they reveal a lot about the social period the social history of that period which now has become completely ignored and forgotten if you go to the next slide I'll quickly give you an example of some of these posters which were again produced in a communist period the poster you see on the left was actually sorry the newspaper you see on your my left or your probably all right we left is an important newspaper that was published in the 1940s which commemorated people that were killed during the Ethiopian Italian occupation of Ethiopia the massacre so we have these examples and they are also available on microfilm they've been microfilmed they have important like I said social history and I forgot to the next slide other important books as I mentioned to you are these communist books they are they were all produced between the beginning of the 1973 to 1984 and they were mostly important translations of communist workers for example this one on my right hand side Esha socialist lot a revolution through farming which was written by a lady and so they were translation we have around 90 of these books of probably about 100 and I've just finished writing an article on this which should soon will be published if we go to the next slide another important examples where in books we have a reproduction of old communist poster and then on the left hand side that yellow book titled Ethiopia which was a novel written about the revolution next slide please and that's my conclusion thank you very much for now I hand you over to my colleague Mariam so hello my name is Mariam Dahan and I am the curator of the African collections and the item that I have chosen to present to you today is a item a book called frozen chicken train wreck by Lawrence hamburger it was published in Johannesburg South Africa in 2013 so I chose quite a contemporary item to present to you today it is a collection of South African tabloid posters and these tabloid posters were collected by the author from 2008 to 2013 the goal was to preserve these posters because they are funny they are clever and they are true as the author said and also on top of that because these posters are not archived by the newspapers themselves instead these posters exist within Johannesburg for one day and they are placed on electricity poles like we can see in the center image which the author took on Louis Boffa Avenue in Johannesburg where they live one of the interesting things about this book is that as we flick through it it shows how sensational and how outlandish headlines can be but at the same time it shows an alternative history of the city so most of these headlines come from political soundbites public innuendos and hard bitter truths so for example we have on the left an image from the suet and it's a tabloid poster where the headline is I saw my Africa collapse and to the right we have one that says all blacks are brilliant and this is from the times and was from December 1st 2009 and when you look at all these tabloid posters they show again an alternative history and at the same time while you're there and also having known about that time period you learn a little bit more about the sort of politics and at the same time the cultural happenings that are happening within the city at the same time it shows a local vernacular which is Shabin English which is spoken in Johannesburg and it shows how that local vernacular is presented by the news and how it's presented by newspapers it should be noted that because these posters are so widely available and because they are so so much part of the urban fabric when you're walking through the city of Johannesburg you see these posters when you're driving through the city of Johannesburg you see these posters and it really becomes part of the city itself and as one editor to a newspaper put it the posters are the perfect marriage of a corrupted society and a progressive constitution next slide please now when we're looking at this in relation to the breaking news exhibition we see the same sort of the same kind of sensational and outlandish headlines within this book as we see both within the breaking news exhibition and at the same time within our own daily lives when we're looking at news at the same time we start to question whether these tabloid posters whether they are an example of something that is reported or something that is distorted for example the central image in the central tabloid poster by the citizen which was published and on the 19th of September 2012 it says that cops were trained to slay vampires now for people who are not part of that not part of that culture not part of Johannesburg and not part of that time period it may be a question of is vampire something within shabin english or is something is it a slang term or is it something that had occurred at that time and these are the sort of questions where you start to ask yourself or for example karate goat hates me people who as as somebody who doesn't who is in part of that time period we may not understand who karate goat is and at the same time we may not understand whether this is an actual reporting or a sort of distorted headline and at the same time within this book when you flick through you realize that there is a focus on sex and the scandal so for example one of the ones that I found was quite a comedic was this the left image from the daily sun where it says that a goat was caught in a sex scandal and when you look through this entire book you see time and time again the sort of comedic humor that we have and finally in in conclusion these posters might be unique to Johannesburg and South Africa but the concept of an almost absurd headline is not and it really makes us contemplate the headlines that we consume and how they seem almost insane in a way so that's the item that I wanted to present to you today. Thank you so much Mariam that was absolutely fascinating and indeed all of these presentations took us right into the core themes of the Breaking the News exhibition with the fake news the propaganda sensationalism and it just shows what a global enterprise those themes are so thank you all very much I'd like you to switch your cameras back on now please and we'll see if there are any questions from the audience I don't think there are but that's fine because I've got some of my own Mariam I'd like to start with you please your comment that headlines are funny clever and true I must say everything right now certainly does feel like a frozen chicken train wreck but in the sense that tabloids are a barometer of public mood and the politics of a given time I just wondered is there other information sort of meta information that you garner from these items for example they're advertising that the price the pricing schemes who the writers are are these details also parts of your research so when you're looking at the tabloid posters well specifically this item that Lawrence Humberger created and frozen chicken train wreck is also one of the headlines by the way but when you're looking at that item you do see that the tabloid posters are quite cheap and at the same time they're displayed in the city all throughout so in terms of headlines they're free to consume and at the same time because somebody who is out of that time period and out of that cultural situation may not fully understand what was going on at that time but somebody who is there they understand oh this is what's going on this is what the poster and the headline is saying even though they are outlandish and they seem even more outlandish to us because we're not part of that time period so with your question on whether it's easy to consume then yeah it's very easy because they're all free for anybody who's walking by anybody who's driving by to read and the newspapers themselves are quite quite inexpensive where one of the newspapers actually had the price of just three rand so yeah three south african rand so they are actually quite cheap yeah in a sense of a sort of democratic form of of information sharing which brings me to um Hanlin I'd like to ask you a question um thank you for setting out the the flow of of how items become into the public domain um I just wondered Hanlin could you talk about uh you said uh I liked the phrase allowing the audience to make its own interpretation can you talk about how your work democratizes the collections held within the British Library um so it's your questions that how we interpreted the items were how you facilitate others interpretations more really what what is its journey from being sort of locked away in a safe dark you know very careful space how do you widen that access and democratize the item okay right so um so it will come to like various items in the libraries so um maybe the public may not know as the library in the chinese collections we do have various materials of the collections it's not only books we also have these printings we also have some um manuscripts and some special items so how we make those items for the public easiest way is um the audience and the public can come to the libraries apply the reader pass and you can request those materials to be read in the reading rooms although this do you mind if I just jump in because some of my friends didn't know how easy it is to get a reader pass and I just like to make sure that you don't have to be an academic or anybody at all all you need is a phone bill and an address to come in and get a reader's pass and I just had to um to just barge in there I apologize for interrupting just no sorry don't yes so uh SP just say it's it it is not difficult to get the reader pass and as long as you get the reader pass you can access to the library's reading rooms then you can access to this material as like the treasures so it's not secure to academic or only the curators can access it so the simplest way is to consult the materials in the reading rooms seconds of course as just I said it might subject to the conditions of the items but don't worry and don't disappoint it you always can contact to the curators provide your purpose of research and we can evaluate if you um it's uh you can see the original items or not subject to the conditions of the items the first step is uh what the library at the moment also pursue is to make our collections online so we also under carry on many digitizations projects to digitize our materials and put it online so the audience or the public can access to the high resolutions image all over the world no matter when you are as like 3 p 3 am in the morning was the in the afternoon for a cup of tea so no matter where you are and what times on your you can access those uh image online furthermore we also have a couple of events for example today's events thank you for organizing the and cultural events teams so for these kind of small events we also promote our collections to let the public know we have these kind of treasures also we quite frequently will publish our blog posts on the British Library's blog post channels we also use these um ways to promote our collections to let the public knows sometimes we also undertake carry out the show entails for the specific target audience for example students from the universities and I just remember for from the library we host the phd open day to introduce our collections to the phd students so as I just described as many steps and from different perspectives or different directions how you want to access the materials the library did provide quite a lot of channels to that's very helpful so if anyone was wondering what curators do all day now we have a much better idea of that um one of our audience has just shared a question um it says here we have curators with a focus on China Japan Ethiopia and Africa countries at a whole continent I was curious how this was approached within the library it's a very good question you're talking about editorial balance of how we've attempted to cover this region the truth is uh dear audience that it's really a question of who was available and we've sadly lost one of our speakers today so um it's not a sense of really editorializing the importance of certain regions as opposed to others but really which of our curators was able to to share their time and join us today I hope that that's an adequate answer for you and please do remember there's another session next week covering different regions with different curators moving on to another question I'd like to ask you yes your your demonstration showed that fake news is nothing new and it led me to wonder has there ever been a hoax item or a fake in our collections or um have you had to authenticate or verify an item well this time um the title of fake news or fake items um we have chosen the title especially for this event because this is um um this is the connected to the main uh exhibition at the breaking news so it's not it depends on how you describe what is fake so we have the facsimile of the antiquarian material that facsimile do we say it's a fake or not and um when the facsimile was created with the purpose of the preservation of the real item that facsimile is not fake because that has a purpose and we know it was facsimile it's a very similar copy and we say to the user this is a facsimile because the real item is in the fragile condition something like that well um you asked Hanlin about our prints and Hanlin explained them briefly how we print the items well I would like to back up what Hanlin was saying especially this type of the propaganda poster is difficult to handle at the library because we do not want to give the user as a misunderstanding as we are actively collecting propaganda poster for the for the for the sake of scattering the propaganda to the world no that is not our purpose so how do you manage that because that there is a an editorial line to be balanced there isn't there how do you how do you add that context well so that's why we it's the online exhibition with our japanese partner uh Hanlin mentioned the name of the japanese partner it's say it's the japanese center for the japanese japanese center for age and historical record so in short words there was digital branch of the national archive of japan and the specific to treat the time span of the 19th century to 20th century so first of all our signed japanese war print has a good balance of chinese prints and japanese prints together and it came to the british museum together and we we know the evidence when it was purchased from a london bookstore so so that's why we thought aha and that's the british museum thought that was a visual aid material to know about the political conflict in the far east then they are aware that is a print propaganda print so somehow um those prints was given the shelf mark at the japanese collection not the chinese collection and also not the visual art of print collection at the british museum so that's why when british museum and british library were physically completely separated the collection was transferred from the british museum to the british library then 1994 and british library it's still physically not completely completely separated from the british museum but i wanted to do the bit of this tiny showcase at the king's library of a king's corridor for a moment british museum 1994 that time we didn't have technology to print two-byte languages i.e chinese script or japanese script so having the exhibition with only for the romanized chinese or romanized japanese with english text it was tough because the tourists come to the king's gallery and say oh you are putting the propaganda poster and then your explanation was wrong so it was a bit of a bitter experience we had so that's why we jointly um we set up the joint project with our japanese partner on 2016 it was a long time before any other my colleagues sitting here joined to the library so and what we did was we digitalized all the print and put onto the gallery everything's on the gallery and have got a bit of the topics like julian changed incident or other incident compare and contrast the same event in chinese japanese plus digital archival document from a japanese partner to say this is a fact as the japanese archive was saying this is the images then we are the resource holder and provides the resources from online our website so anyone from all over the world 24 hours access so that is a way to provide the information and as handi mentioned okay this is the resources here you are you use it you study it and you research it we are the resource holder we are happy to share with you thank you so much that's a really fascinating backstory and also such a sort of long train of collaborative work that's that's that's led to this moment quite appropriate that you presented in a in collaboration so thank you iob i'd like to come to you now please um i thought your presentation was just brilliant uh i'm particularly interested in your own little bit of propaganda that you sneaked in there that were all seven years younger in Ethiopia but um you know the very striking bold soviet styled imagery um and then all of the many layers of meaning and messaging that you that you unpeeled from that and that was fascinating you suggested at one point that there are many more that haven't yet been digitized is this a is this a new part of the collection um so just just to answer the the question that the gentleman um the person asked regarding um uh the collection he says uh we have curators focused on Japan, Ethiopia and Africa just to point out that we actually are we work with the languages so we're not really a curator of uh you know china or japan but we work with specifically with the languages um so the way the library is is is is is established is based on the collection so you have people working on latin and greek um and when exhibitions like this come up curators organizing the exhibition they usually approach us to ask us what material do we have within that language um and to answer your point um so in terms of digitizing this material they're not really a priority and there is a long you know sort of long wait to to digitize important manuscripts and early printed books this items the way they came in was some of them were through donation most were acquired by the library not much focus was given on these printed materials because people because people were really interested in ancient european manuscripts linguists um and when the library was established as i said before it's it's a language based collection that we have most scholars were really working on manuscripts and um early sort of printed books and that's that's the reason why it never had but to make it a priority maybe when my article comes out i could try to persuade my boss so tell us more about the article so my article focuses on this kind of collection with the library so the communist uh books and in particular novels like tall stories were that were translated uh into the european um amharic language so it's the first um article to just do it to um not just attempt but to kind of uh call people to start taking this material really um seriously and when can we read this is this going to be a curator's blog no this will be a peer-reviewed journal which will be hopefully published by the Institute of Ethiopian Studies they just keep sending me proofs after proofs and yeah a lot of work but i hope to turn it into a blog once well i can tell by the enthusiastic nods of your colleagues that we're all very much looking forward to reading that you suggested though that there is a queue of materials waiting to be digitized and and how does that work so we i mean at the library for the Ethiopian collection were fortunate enough to secure a grant in aid in 2017 to digitize important sets of 300 Ethiopian manuscripts that were acquired in 1868 the way it works is basically the library prioritized digitization firstly on the basis of the material fragility and how rare it is um and and previously the library also had to seek funding from outside to have those these such as the Hebrew manuscripts projects for example is a good example are where it's been helped we've been aided by the Prosky Foundation so priority really is based on and the importance of work so you know it's a huge library with a lot of important collections so you have the Magna Carta and you have many many treasures within the library that you know that that are really important and should be digitized and sometimes deciding what to digitize it's also not that easy you have to work with scholars you have to work with communities in my case I did get a feedback from the Ethiopian community what item they would like to be digitized okay can you talk as I'm really fascinated by that process because there is a sort of almost when you're in the British library it's almost overwhelming just the idea that every book ever published you know there's so many sound archives almost where to begin and so I'm fascinated by that the idea of it being an interactive process where you you speak to communities can can you tell us a bit about how you went about that yeah so basically the so the role of curators very misleading sometimes and sometimes partly accurate and sometimes not accurate because the the title is a hungover from the British Museum when we were part of the British Museum we are you know at one point specialist subject language specialist and we are curators because our main fundamental role important roles are to make the collection visible and as yes you are and Hanline emphasized is actually going out there and telling people we have this collection by writing or giving talks or blogs and and the second important thing is also to make to develop the collection again in the case of other departments which acquire more material than than than my section developing the collection is key then safeguarding the collection so a lot of a good example is the difference between the material I showed you and the material Hanline and Yoshua showed you because mine is newspaper it's not a high-grader material where a conservation will be required to look after it or examine it like the one that you see with Yasuo which is digitized and it went through sort of conservation treatment you can't just you know handle it so there in that case we are like museum curators as well and the other final thing is making the collection widely accessible we do this through cataloging either cataloging of printed books or cataloging of archive materials or cataloging manuscripts and I completely forgot your question because I just went into definition of a curator I think I think you answered about 17 questions there so I'm very happy with that don't worry we have got a very quiet audience I you know audience you're making me work really hard here come on audience I'm sure you're all very well informed and have lots of questions at the back of your mind but in the absence of further audience questions I'm just going to throw one more around this is for all of you so anybody just switch off your microphone what was the hardest part of being a curator for me I this is very easy for me beside many other things but the most hardest thing is when we are contacted to identify items sometimes you you know books from Ethiopia or manuscripts and sometimes we receive languages we don't know I've received even you know manuscripts with Greek lost texts or it could even be Tolkien's writing so that's one for me interesting we'll never a dull moment I'm sure Marianne what would yours be yeah I have to agree with you so because I work with an entire continent but thankfully you works with Ethiopia and we also do have so I am the curator of the Africa but south of the Sahara so we also have the curator of the Middle East and North Africa those are put together to also clarify for the person who asked about that but yeah one of I have to say one of the challenging things is that we receive items in all these different languages I speak so helifluently I speak enough French to be able to read and understand what's going on there and Dutch so I can understand Africans as well but when it comes to for example we have a lot of items in Hausa in Ibo in in King Erwanda in Ganda all these different languages and sometimes you you have to catalog an item and you're looking at it and you're trying to figure out what language is this in so it's one of those challenges when that happens you kind of take the item around the office and say hey everybody what's this and what do you do well it's it's great if it's in Amharic or a language that is an Ethiopian language because then I could just go straight to Eup and be like Eup or if it's in Arabic script because we also have a lot of items like for example almost well all of our Swahili manuscripts actually are in a Jamie Swahili so they're in Swahili but in Arabic script so those are a little bit easier because you can go to people who speak Arabic within the office and then you can also decipher because a lot of them are in Arabic but at the same time they have either in the margins the Swahili terms so that is easier to decipher with languages that are not spoken within the library and many of the African languages are not spoken in the African library in the in the library so with those there are actually materials that there's a very handy little blue book I have it like down next to me on my desk but there's a handy little blue book that just talks that looks at all these sort of language all these sort of terms like for example Kitabu is a book in Swahili or Andika or is also to write so it will have all these African languages and terms that you'll find within books like Ndi is by in Seychelua Creole so it helps so you can pick a part which which part of the book so I'll say like published and stuff like that so you'll you'll decipher which language it is based on that little blue book and also just searching and researching around well thank you so much for that really fascinating insight into the detective work that you do Hanlin and Yasya would you do would you like to contribute Hanlin you're the first so yes as Yob and Marian just say it's one of the difficulties but this is also what makes our job and work very interesting and quite energetic is we can come across various different of materials language these by days if I have to say one of the difficulties really in my job is when you see the items in the conditions is not really well to provide the original access to the readers and the readers is really enthusiastic to the original items we have the responsibilities to looking after the items but we also really hope the the researchers were readers who really want to see are able to see it so really the most difficult one is we need to protect the collections but also need to provide access but um so would it just arrive in the post do you just get kind of a big lumpy post back every day and go oh what's here um not every day but I would say quite frequently we have the we receive the readers ask questions from readers say can you help about this what is this say so not only for the British Library's items we also provide like help with the general audience or visitors questions even is not library's items yes you are over to you just uh two more minutes please okay I think we colleagues from the Asian African collection as Ayub mentioned we represent of the language area and we are very much specialized to the cultural aspect where we represent so I would think as the British Library has the flagship motto world knowledge in the UK in the British Library we represent our country Ayub it's at the mini Ethiopia Mariam is a mini Africa south of the Sahara and like handling is a mini China and I'm a mini Japan so the expectation to us is we should have known everything is about our area and we do our best to cover the full field of expectation and when we come to the international relationship because we work with the international partner when I go to Japan I need to switch my thinking is now I'm up representing of the British Library um in Japan so a kind of the balance of international relationship and plus my duty or our our responsibility in the British Library it's some time we need to make sure where we are standing now we are standing in the UK and promoting Japan then I'm standing in Japan promoting the British Library and the UK so that is um something we need to be fairly balanced and it's quite a challenge but exciting as well that's why we love our job the love for your job has all been made evident in this presentation today I'm very grateful to you all for for joining us and sharing the work that includes diplomacy and detective work it's been absolutely brilliant to hear from you all and I'd like to remind our audience that we have another session at the same time next week 12 30 on Thursday the 23rd of June and that will be with the British Library's Americas and Europe team which is the the exhibition breaking the news is open now so if you're anywhere near London do come in for a visit and there are lots more news related events on our website but in the meantime I'd just like to wholeheartedly thank the curators Yasuo, Hanlin, Ayob and Maryam thank you very much and uh audience see you all next time goodbye