 So to kind of kick things off, our first speaker is Jenny Shaw, who is the Collections Development Manager at the Wellcome Collection. So Jenny will be talking to us through diversity and inclusion in archival, in UK archival collection development. Jenny will share her research and how archives attempted to develop their collections in a more inclusive way to include a wider range of perspectives. Jenny will talk through about how archiving theory can support my more diverse collections and looking at how some archival practice can explore some of the challenges of measuring progress. Jenny Shaw, as I mentioned earlier, is the Collections Development Manager for Wellcome. Jenny's interested in how archival collecting can be more representative and inclusive of non-dominant perspectives. So I'll hand it over to Jenny. Cool, thank you. So hello, I'm Jenny Shaw and in my day job, I'm the Collections Development Manager at Wellcome Collection. I'm afraid that my slides quite boring, so I've illustrated them with things from our collection, which are slightly random. I'm trying to move my slide on. Okay, there it is. Sorry, there's a really big delay on my slide, so apologies if it's out of sync. I lead the team responsible for developing our collections in support of our vision of a world in which everyone's experience of health matters. Today, I'd like to talk about the research that I did on diversity and inclusion in UK archival development as part of my fellowship. The idea for this research fellowship came out considering an application to the acceptance in lieu scheme. For those of you not familiar with it, this scheme is administered by the Arts Council and allows material of cultural, scientific or historical significance to be gifted to a public institution such as a library, museum or archive and sees a reduction in the amount of inheritance tax that needs to be paid. And surprisingly for a scheme which benefits those with larger estates, the archive material that's gifted to the nation through the scheme is not the most diverse. In 2022, the archives included were two relating to high ranking military careers, three related to the estate papers of families with land and titles, two of high profile published authors, and one was scientific papers of a scientist with a Nobel Prize. These acquisitions of collections are important, but I was interested in other types of collection development taking place. I wanted to explore ideas around value and knowledge, including how different forms of knowledge are valued and inequalities of this scheme. I was also interested in finding out more about activity across the UK archive sector, particularly working with those traditionally excluded from archive collections. My fellowship can be broken down into three main areas of research, archival theory on developing collections, investigating practice in UK archives and recording information and measuring progress. So looking at archival theory, it's unsurprising that dominant groups feature so prominently in archival theory and archival collections. Power lies in our institutions, which have dominant characteristics baked into their structures. Much of the Western Canon of archival theory comes from 20th century experience of working with traditional hierarchical bureaucratic organizations. This has led to generations of archives and archivists employing practices that are based on archival theory rooted in dominance, including appraisal methodologies that over represent dominant groups. One problem is that these structures, theories and practices are seen as the norm, the mainstream, and are such or not named or stated. To quote Michelle Casswell, these perspectives have masqueraded as unnamed universals in both methodologies for determining archival value and lingering assertions about the alleged neutrality of the archivist. I found this concept of naming the dominant perspective of webcham, which Hope Olson explores in her article, patriarchal structures of subject access and subversive techniques for change. An interesting lens to look at archival collections through. So considering the white, ethnically European, bourgeois, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied male to which others have also added citizen and sis. By naming this dominant concept, it makes explicit what has been implied, and I think it's quite a useful concept to hold and consider when thinking about archival collections. For my research, I've been considering the extent to which archival collecting in the UK extends beyond this position of dominance, how many steps we take away from it, how much intersectionality there is. Through my research into archival theory, I found some ideas and approaches that I think are quite useful when attempting to diversify the range of voices represented within archive collections and reflecting how they might influence my practice. So in her article, dusting for fingerprints, introducing feminist standpoint appraisal, Michelle Casswell highlights feminist epistemology of valuing the knowledge gained through lived experience. This valuing of lived experience resonated with the work that we've been doing at Welcome Collection. This has been evident recently in our collecting around art and health, where many artists express experience of their own health or treatment through their creative output. Collections from artists such as Brian Chanley, who expressed his experience of living with schizophrenia, sits alongside those from medical professionals and charities working in this area such as psychiatrists, mental health charities, art therapists. If our traditional structures value certain records, voices and forms of knowledge over others, then community archives can act as powerful counter narratives to official history and archives. Through my research, I've been speaking to people involved in community archives, including those in more traditional archives, many of whom are attempting to support post custodial models of collecting in their areas. But even with community led archives, there are still quite a lot of structural issues, as those with time, space and other resources needed to collect and care for archives. It tends to still have those dominant features. There are a lot of factors involved in whether material survives once it's no longer needed for current use. To start with, some groups, individuals and organisations are more likely to produce records in the course of their activities. For example, organisations arranged along bureaucratic lines are more likely to create rock records than those with less formal structures. Businesses providing a service like hairdressers are likely to create far fewer records than architectural firms and manufacturing companies. Then some accumulations of records are more likely to survive than others, those with space to store material, private offices, country estates and with administrative support to support them with that. Religious groups without their own buildings, such as those whose congregations meet in rented spaces, schools, cinemas, community spaces, will have a very different experience of attempting to store records than those who have their own formal buildings. Finally, there's an element of those who have experience of archives or who see themselves already represented in archive collections who are more likely to see the value in the material that they hold. So although community archives have huge potential to disrupt the archive, they can provide a greater range of voices, but they are not a silver bullet. So looking at my next theory, it's important not to dismiss all of Western Canada archival theory and one area where attempting to diversify approaches and traditional archival theory can come together quite successfully is participatory approaches. Archivists have a long history and plentiful experience of preserving context and of recognising the value of how, when and why records were produced. Gaining a thorough understanding of the institution or person who created the records, maintaining the original order to preserve the relationship between records and knowledge architecture in which they were created, are core archival skills which can be put to use in the service of participatory practice. This approach requires careful consideration of the power balance that exists between archival repositories and record creators alongside a lot of cooperation and dialogue. Participatory archiving asks that choices made in the process are made explicit and transparent, the importance once again of making visible what has often been secured by the archival process. And finally, I'd like to highlight the potential for slow archives, which dismantle the capitalist model of production of trying to find efficiencies and approaches which work at scale. The slow archives approach is about focusing differently, listening carefully and acting ethically. By slowing down, we can help to build sustained partnerships over longer periods of time, meeting people where they are, letting them set the pace of interactions and navigating the things that look like barriers for them together. So moving on to look at my next area of research, archival practice. I was interested in finding out more about some of the work that's been going on across the UK archival sector that could support more diverse collecting. One feature of my fellowship is that I had a mentor at the National Archives who really helped me to identify relevant groups. I was also supported by the regional and networks team who generously shared their knowledge of work happening in their areas. This was not intended to be a comprehensive survey of archival practice. Instead, it was an opportunity to explore some different approaches. I managed to speak with seven different groups and individuals during my fellowship. And during these interviews, we looked at the history of their collecting, the motivations for collecting in particular areas, the approaches they took, how the material is managed or might be managed in the long term, some of their successes, and some of the barriers or blocks that they might have experienced with their collecting efforts and whether there's been any change over time. I'm still working on editing these transcripts and ensuring that the interviewees are satisfied with the final version. I'm going to talk about this area of my research in more detail at the Archives and Records Association Conference in August. In addition to the detailed investigation into certain archives or groups, I also wanted to get a broad set of data from across the sector to see if it was possible to discern change over time. I was interested in using the annual Accession to Repositories data. For those of you not familiar with it, Accessions to Repositories is an annual survey organised by the National Archives. It aims to collect information about archive and manuscript accessions in the preceding calendar year. A summary of this data is available on TNA's website from 1994 to 2021 with the return for 2022 currently being processed. Unfortunately, the information contained within these surveys was not consistent enough or clean enough data to allow meaningful analysis in the time that I had available for my research. Some of the issues included free text, which is difficult to extract information from, with information spread across multiple fields such as creator or description, making it difficult to deploy data analysis. Inconsistent date formats, accession dates are normally fairly inexact, but the formats varied wildly, with some were precise, some were spanned, some were estimates, some were brackets. Others were non-valid date formats such as question marks, unknown, or ND, not at no date, and various variations of those. There was also quite a lot of inconsistency in the extent formats, such as number of boxes, linear meters, cubic meters, numbers of volumes, or data for digital accessions. So although many archivists are now using accessioning modules in their collections management systems, a lot of the practice still harks back to the paper accession register. So although we now store our data in the databases, a lot of it's much more suited to human readers than machines. In 2019, the Canadian Council of Archives created an accession information standard and an attempt to overcome some of these problems. It should create more uniformity in the use of fields and has mandatory fields, but the crucial issue of data in the key fields like date is still left to repository zone standards, so it doesn't overcome all of the issues. This has made me reflect a lot on my own accession process at Welcome Collection. We do have internal guidance on how to complete the fields to try to improve consistency. We clearly mark accruals. We have a standard way of expressing dates. We express the extent in a traditional box number kind of way, and then we convert this to cubic meters to assist in collections management planning. I'd like to do a bit more work in this area, so I'd like to investigate some of the analysing the information to spot trends with fewer but larger accessions. Create summaries such as proportion of accruals, internal transfers, new collections, etc. But also demonstrating how our collecting supports our vision. Taking a different approach to collections development has huge potential to disrupt some of the dominance in the archives, but there are a lot of challenges. A lot of the approaches are very resource intensive and will only ever be a small step away from the dominance. It's ingrained in a lot of traditional record keeping structures. There's also no certainty of resulting in traditional success measures, which are normally donations of collections to archives. So this raises quite important questions about how do we measure success in collections development. And I think if our current measures don't fit this measure of success, then maybe we need to develop some new measures based more on outcomes rather than outputs. Thank you. That's me. Thank you very much, Jenny. So we'll move on to our next presentation, which is by Holly Smith, who is the project archivist working on the Women's Aid Federation of England archive at the University of Leeds. Holly will be introducing us to the Women's Aid Federation archive, talking through some of the ways her TNA, RLUK professional fellowship into inclusive cataloging practice has affected her approach to documenting this significant collection. So I'll hand it over to Holly now. Thank you. Hi everyone. I'm Holly Smith. I'm the project archivist for the Women's Aid Federation of England archive, which is held up at the University of Leeds Special Collections. So hopefully you can see my screen shared there. I'm looking at inclusive cataloging. So I have been a professional fellow with the National Archives and Research Libraries UK for most of 2022 up until February 2023. As you've heard, these fellowships allowed us to kind of pick a research topic and run with it basically, which has been great. And we've also been encouraged to network, get involved with wider archive discussions and produce outputs that help to overcome some of the challenges found in the archive and heritage worlds today. I've picked inclusive cataloging because mainly I felt that my role as archivist for the Women's Aid archive provided a great case study for this. So my original fellowship title was the rather catchy documenting complex histories, balancing multifaceted representation of marginalized histories of accessible archive navigation, which is quite a mouthful, but basically sums up the paradox that got me quite interested in inclusive cataloging in the first place. So it's this documenting of complex layered descriptions that authentically represent voices in an archive. But then on the other side is the importance of ensuring simplicity and accessibility and easy navigation for researchers. So these seem kind of at odds with each other. And it's a tricky question to see how we can achieve both and get a catalog that's both representative, but also quite welcoming and accessible to researchers. So this is the kind of path that led me to the general theme of inclusive cataloging, which is much less of a mouthful to say. And it really allowed me to check myself a real range of outputs for the fellowship, some of which I'm going to talk about today. So all of the themes are slightly interlinked, but I'm going to pull out three of them. So the first is going to be quite a general look at cataloging, but in particular focusing on access points and sensitivity. And then going to go on to talk about trauma and form practice. And finally, I'm excited to share some of the work I've been doing around community engagement. But first, I want to quickly introduce you to the women's archive. So as I said, the women's archive has provided me a great case study for my research. As I'm sure you're all aware, women's voices are often absent in traditional archives or collections. So this archive is quite a rarity. It's records that are inspired, created and used by women. And my fellowship has allowed me to really focus time in on how I can do that justice. So I would like to flag at this stage that the women's archive looks at domestic abuse, women's it is a domestic abuse charity. And our archive interacts with various sensitive issues around this topic. I won't be overly mentioning details of domestic abuse during this presentation, but I will share some details at the end for anyone that might feel affected by some of the stuff we discuss on the screen. So Women's Aid is an acclaimed domestic abuse charity that works as the national coordinating body for local domestic abuse services. They provide information, training, resources, as well as lobbying and campaigning for women's rights and legislative change. Women's Aid has been at the forefront of the Refuge movement for almost half a century and they're due to celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2024. Women's Aid emerged out of the activism around the women's liberation movement in the 70s. They were back then known as the National Women's Aid Federation, so you can see some of the anagrams on the screen now. And back then they were initially seen as quite a radical activist group. They were raising awareness of very taboo subjects at the time, like domestic abuse and also the idea of gendered violence. They're a man of 20 years coming forward to the 90s and beyond. Women's Aid transformed into a highly respected organization for its original research and expertise. They're still operating today and have helped make astonishing changes to the lives of women and children suffering abuse. So this very brief introduction kind of gives you an insight into how rich and complex this history is. It only discusses the history of the domestic abuse movement, but also women's liberation, refuges, social history, legal history and so much more. So I really wanted to ensure I was making this represented and accessible in our catalogs. So just to come to that first pit stop looking at cataloging in general. So at an early stage in my fellowship, I held a researcher event. And I asked attendees what their main entry points were for archive catalogs. And I thought this was quite an interesting kind of starting point. So the most popular answer was searching for key people or organizations. This was closely followed by a more generic free text search. And then can things like dates, finding aids were quite high up there and also stuff like location subject. And at the bottom was browsing the archive hierarchy. So this reflects a general feeling in archives at the moment and move away from that hierarchical search function into a more focused look on individual records and descriptions. So this made me want to approach cataloging the women's archive by hitting those men metadata entry points, having really informative succinct descriptions and just really getting that created location system up and running. So this is particularly important for things like our external organization series. So you can see here in the middle. This is from our international file series and some stuff from Denmark. So being able to put things like location and creators and dates for that kind of stuff immediately makes it much more searchable. It was also great to see finding aids up there and that researchers were using them to access catalogs. So one where we've been covering this is by devising volunteer indexing projects. So you can see here some of our lovely volunteers working to index and newspaper clippings audio visual collection. We've also got people working on our staff meeting series. And I can already tell these are going to be an amazing resource for opening up areas of the archive that otherwise would have been quite overwhelming for researchers to approach single handedly. So for this area, my main fellowship outputs have been quite simple, but it's basically coming down to a more informed catalog. And then also in this beam, I wanted just to go over sensitive language in archive descriptions, as I'd previously done some work on this and really enjoyed figuring out workflows around it. And my fellowship allowed me to come back and spend some more time thinking about it. So settling on an approach around sensitivity statements and the processes around flagging records is definitely never easy. And they're simultaneously a load of ways we could be doing this also none of them quite seem perfect. So my fellowship allow me to go out and visit some archives and network and see how people are doing it. I went to the National Archives, the Bishop's Gate and the Women's Library in the London School of Economics. And basically everyone's approaching it slightly differently and trying their best in a field of archiving that doesn't really have any guidelines yet and can be quite controversial in how we approach it. And like I say workflows had already been established in our special collections, but the fellowship allowed me to go back into this with help from amazing colleagues and reword our statements and make it clearer how they're being used. It's time to go into all of that now. And if anyone wants to discuss sensitive language my emails at the end, more than happy to talk to people about it. But for now I wanted to focus on the output in terms of my fellowship and that was a sensitivity policy. And so this was basically setting out a clear transparent way, the what how and why of the processes around dealing with sensitive language in archives. Including some caveats about how the process isn't going to be perfect and how we'll be reviewing it periodically going forward. We also wanted to sign post how people can contact us if they spot mistakes or want to know more. So this policy was a really great way of champion transparency and it's an output. I'm really proud of involved of involving this fellowship. And it's allowed me to be more thoughtful about how we deal with some of the sensitive material in the Women's Archives. The next whistle stop tour is Traumatic Farm Practice. So as you can tell from the history of the archive, I gave you an introduction to and I'll stir this work around sensitivity. The Women's Archives deals with a lot of potentially triggering subjects. For example, on these slides and some of the ones before. We've seen relatively low level examples of posters and postcards that were readily available to the public. But even with these we can see examples of historic language such as battered wives and quite a motive references to violence. And despite its obviousness, it was actually only when we came to discuss our volunteer program that we really took a step back and realize we needed some set guidelines and measures in place to ensure the well being of people interacting with the archive. So we began to research Traumatic Farm Practice. And this is a growing recognition of the impact trauma can have on people, particularly being aware of the symptoms of vicarious trauma and compassion fatigue such as desensitization, apathy, burnout, and basically how they can present themselves in a number of different ways in different people. So in the archive world, it's really relevant because we're often dealing with very personal, emotive historic material. The popularity of the Traumatic Farm Archives community of practice group is testament to this. So they're an online forum that regularly discuss case studies of secondary trauma and archives, emotional responses to records, and the emotional labor of archivists. And their resources are really useful. So I recommend people reaching out to them and taking a look. So we kind of took this and did more research around trauma informed work both in archives and kind of wider looking at medical things also. And we came up with two outputs, a volunteer handbook and a volunteer management checklist. So the volunteer handbook goes over the type of material volunteers might come across during the project informs them on vicarious trauma, shares relevant resources and basically gives them a toolkit on how to approach their own personal ways of dealing with sensitive material. The volunteer management checklist outlines what we should, what should be done by us as managers during after, before during and after a volunteer project to ensure a duty of care to our volunteers. So this includes things like an introductory tour of the archive, being aware of different people's triggers and having set breaks during the day. For example, we'd be sure to go for a coffee break each session. This got us outside with some distance from the archive and basically gave everyone a chance to talk about how they were feeling or what they've seen in the archive that day. We've had some great feedback from volunteers. And through this work we've also learned the importance of transferring this to staff as well and also researchers. So basically all of this is another way of making the women's archive more transparent, welcoming and inclusive as possible. So the third and final that I wanted to talk about was community engagement. So a lot of what's been discussed so far has focused on the access side of the scale, so how to make records easier to find, how to create an empathetic and welcoming environment for users. But the real area I've been able to solely focus on representation has been through community engagement. The big idea underpinning this is that we as archivists aren't the subject specialists. We don't own this history. We need to build relationships with those whose stories we are trying to tell. So for us, the main contender here was Women's Aid themselves. We wanted the Women's Aid archive to authentically represent the functionality of their organization. So I made sure the Women's Aid representatives provided feedback on things like collection structure, runs of documents and key names. It was just small interventions, but in doing so we're ensuring a more accurate representation of the Women's Aid voice. So this project also benefited from quite close communication with feminist archive NAF as well. So that is a collective whose collections are also housed in the Uni of Leeds Special Collections. And feminist archive NAF also known as FAN is entirely run by volunteers. We're actually involved in the activism of the women's liberation movement back in the 70s and 80s. You often see names coming up that were key in the setting up of feminist archive NAF in the Women's Aid archive as well. So that's a lovely little link. And so this basically makes FAN a really great group for doing community engagement with because for a lot of them this is their story. We know way more about it than I ever would. And I found it really valuable to share material we're working on with them as their expertise and personal experience is really useful. For example, the items you can see on the screen here show a march in Birmingham. All three different things linked to this same march. It's in Birmingham. It's in 1979. But apart from that, we didn't really know much else. They showed it to FAN and they were able to use their networks to find out a bit more. And they told us that at this time in 1979 Birmingham was one of the only large cities that didn't have a council funded refuge. A local group even went as far as to squat in a house but the council still didn't care and serve funding for one. So women's aid organised a massive national demonstration in Birmingham and sent coaches to bring women and children to protest from all over England. Not long after Birmingham Council agreed and a refuge was set up. So it's this kind of feedback and this kind of way of using community engagement that really provides personal details and presents the kind of information you can't gain through a simple Google search. It highlights perfectly how engagement with relevant groups can really enrich your understanding and documentation of a collection. So it was this kind of foundation that led me to organise my final fellowship output. An engagement event where we invited staff and volunteers working in local domestic abuse services in Leeds and Bradford to come in and view some of the archive. We called the event your story just to really highlight the fact that this was their narrative and we were eager to share it with them and learn from them in return. So we ran it to align with the week of International Women's Day. This was only a few weeks ago and we had two main aims going into it. The first was to raise awareness about archive within this stakeholder group and the second was to encourage knowledge exchange. So inspire these women to share their thoughts, experiences and reminiscences with us. So I think it's really important with community engagement in general to approach things ethically, but it felt especially important to cover this with our event. So not only does the Women's Aid archive cover a range of potentially triggering subject areas, but I was also aware that the women that we were inviting to this were doing important work in the domestic abuse field and I didn't want to take their time away from this. So one way I kind of tried to approach this was reaching out to organisations fairly early on a good few months in advance of the event. And this was just in the form of an introductory email. I wanted to explain who I was, what an archive was and what the Women's Aid archive was doing and the projects surrounding it. I could then follow this up a few weeks later with an official invite to the event, which was still sent out far and advanced. This meant that people knew me, they knew what I was doing, they knew the context of the event and anyone wanting to attend so had lots of time to factor it into their schedules. We also ensured we were providing refreshments and a lunch and offering to pay travel expenses. We also made it a two hour drop-in event so people could be flexible about when they turned up. More than anything, we wanted to pick out some amazing items that would really give an insight into the history of Women's Aid and the domestic abuse movement, as this is the history that many of the attendees didn't know or would be eager to find out more about. And with that information with them and in return, they could offer insight from personal experience. So you can see a few items on the screen here that we shared with them. So there's stuff that's quite aesthetically exciting, such as the newsletters, which are those middle two images. Also the calendars are always a good shout and things like that information pack on setting up a refuge was a really great way of starting conversations because we could immediately compare it with how refuges have run nowadays. So we kind of had the basis there to really start conversations and engagement and get people discussing the items. But how were we capturing this information? I knew from my fellowship research that this was the tricky bit and I could talk your ear off for much longer than my 20 minutes slot about the debates around user generated content and current database capacities. All I knew is that I just wanted to record these stories and information shared with us as quickly and easily as possible. So I did this by creating a very simplistic form that our volunteers could use to jot down stuff whilst they were talking to an encouraging participants at the event. So it turned out this was quite a juggling exercise. It maybe wasn't the perfect way of doing it, but we still got some great anecdotes and reflections out of it. So one woman remembered taking women and children from a refuge on a canal holiday. And there were also reminiscences looking at the old newsletters like the ones on the screen here about the process of making them on old Banda machines and then delivering them on bikes. There's also a mention of the whooping cough going round a Lee's refuge in the 80s. And that provoked a conversation with a woman who compared it to working in a Lee's refuge through COVID. We also got some really great emotive responses and feedback that helped to highlight the significance of women's and our collection. So one of the poems in the calendar like the one on the screen here reminded one woman of a conversation she'd had with someone just that same week. There was also a mention of Muslim and Southeast Asian communities in some of our newsletters and one attendee started talking about the stereotype of women from these groups being voiceless. But she noted the importance of changing that narrative. And she was quoted saying change society rather than just put a plaster on it. A great comment I loved is someone saying there's a real sense that women said was genuinely leading a revolution back then and that women working there were single minded individuals dedicating their lives to a cause. So this was all amazing stuff and I was so happy with the outcomes we got from it. How is this going to feed into representation. So through this engagement event, I undeniably gained more of a context and understanding of the world of domestic abuse services. And just by chatting about the photos we showed and laughing at some of the poems in the calendar are comparing what was happening then to our local area at the moment. And in terms of our notes, I've transcribed all the farms and that information is now ready in a document to help enhance catalogue descriptions, contribute to additional context like blog posts publications or collections guides, or to help with future engagement and outreach such as exhibitions. It's very early days this only happened a few weeks ago so I haven't used this information in these ways yet. But through my research I've seen many case studies where the amazing engagement events produce rich valuable information that's ultimately lost because it's not appropriately starred or maintained. So my final act of respect to these amazing women that came to our event will be to ensure their words are looked after and used and use them to make a catalogue that much more representative. So there we have it. That's a very big and probably quite rambly whistle stop tour of how I've looked at inclusive cataloging and the women's aid archive. I'm very grateful to the National Archives and Research Libraries UK for the opportunity to think deeper about these subjects alongside my project archivist role. And although my fellowship has ended I know that this mindset is going to continue for the rest of the women's aid contract and beyond. So thank you very much. And please feel free to contact me with my email on the screen or to ask questions at the end of this event. Thank you. Excellent. Thank you very much, Holly. Just a reminder before we move on, we move on to the next presentation. If you've got any questions at all, please submit them through the Q&A button at the bottom of your screen. Next we're joined by Rachel Menott who is going to share her research into the user desire for diverse narratives in archives and the ethical and practical considerations to capturing record subjects and creators racial identity in archival catalogs. Exploring this within the frame of the need to challenge normative assumptions of people's identity when information is absent. Rachel is a Jamaican Bond artist curator and researcher. She's currently the joint head of diversity, equity and inclusion at the National Archives, as well as the joint head of participation at Birmingham Museums Trust. So I'll hand over to Rachel now. Thank you very much. Are you able to hear me all right and see the slides. Yep, everything's up and running. Perfect. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be able to speak alongside Jenny and Holly. You'll be able to see that there's been quite a bit of cross-section with a lot of our research. And so it's been a real privilege to undertake the fellowship with them. I have an extension on my fellowship, so I haven't quite reached my final conclusions. And so I really want to encourage anyone to make any suggestions or comments and critique. I'm always really open to critique throughout this presentation as it will really help me in terms of kind of coming to my conclusions. So my title for my fellowship was Capturing Diversity and Challenging Normative Assumptions or Record Subjects. And this was something that came about because of in my previous role as Inclusion and Change Manager at the National Archives within Archives sector development. I received a lot of queries from the sector on how to make their diverse narratives more visible. What happens when you get a call from someone internally in the organization to profile your, the first people of color who worked in the organization or the first women who worked in the organization. And they're finding that it was very difficult to access that information. Alongside this, I was often finding that there is a tendency for erasure of this constant kind of focus on the first. And many times, particularly when I was doing work around black history records, there was an often a reinvention of this first and the erasure of some of the histories to come. So part of that is to do with historical under investment in projects that already did that work to find the first. But part of it is also kind of concerning where this information goes in our records. So that's some of the kind of foundations of why I was interested in this idea. I apologize, my slides are very wordy and I'll try to not just read them verbatim but also try and make them as interesting as possible. So my research was kind of exploring particularly what's included and excluded in descriptions of our record subjects and record creators in archival databases versus sort of information that people actually wanted and we're using in different formats. So for example, in search engines or conversations or self descriptions and being really mindful, particularly of the latter, being something that's gaining a lot more traction, especially around different marginalizations and the complex language around describing people's identity. And then considering the ways in which we could challenge normative assumptions when there's absence. So my research primarily focus on race, but it will, it crosses kind of all other protected characteristics and was really influenced by a lot of other research in different areas, but exploring what happens when there isn't, when this information isn't present and what assumptions people are making. And so for example, so in this context it was specifically this assumption of whiteness, if if race wasn't kind of mentioned. And then I wanted to look to see if there were spaces in our database for this information to be usefully stored and sorted and policies around collecting and managing this data that were in place. And then I, and then because information around different types of characteristics including race are special category data. I wanted to look at what changes when some when a record subject is living and dead in terms of the legal changes and also what happens in terms of ethics, because our responsibility on that data changes within in that context but what does what is our ethical imperative, and really kind of considering this different this conflict between what users want this kind of appetite and need for more diverse narratives, more diverse figures to be kind of available as for people's personal representation and for kind of understanding our shared histories, but also what responsibility we have to these record subjects who we are recording. I use this illustration on this slide. The Burns Hepburn Report, which is quite an American context for this but it was exploring sort of gender and race, and how it's been represented in acquisitions in major museums and it's been quite an interesting kind of backdrop to this, because the context around like archives versus museums versus art museums, that the conversations are really different but some of the kind of ethical questions start to kind of converge. And I'm not going to spend too long on this but just briefly on my methodology, and particularly just to kind of say real thanks to Clarissa Chu and the Curatorial Research Center for a lot of the work they've done in terms of looking at inclusive terminology and specific words that are being used. This created quite a lot of foundation for some of my research. I was looking at the UK Catholic source as well. And I did a survey which had about 37 responses, and I did some personal interviews to understand different people's processes. During my residency, which my fellowship was with Queen Mary University, I ran a workshop describing people to find people which was exploring kind of self description, as well as what as a user what you would be looking for in terms of information. And then I looked through kind of common versus discovery and how these two systems were being used to catalog this information. I want to highlight that basically I don't have, I never got a lot of usable data sets from my research, but I got a lot of indicative trends which were useful for kind of staring some of my questions but in no way what I found is comprehensive and my research methodology would need to be a lot more rigorous to try and get some of these questions answered. And things that were outside of scope were things like content notes, but they came up came up a lot, especially around some of the questions to do with cataloging race. And there was an initial desire to create a suggested Cesaris. And I wasn't able to do that, but there are about 1285 combined terms from the research that I found that could be used to start to work up maybe more of a series of search terms. So my starting assumptions were as follows that despite potential spaces for information in records management databases for known identity information that falls within the special category data that this information was not collected, or if it was done it was done inconsistently around record subjects that because of this permissions weren't around this information were not sought a standard practice. And it's not often considered the sort of permissions we wanted to collect around living subjects and their protective characteristic data for the for our archive. And that these oversights have particular peculiarities in regards to race and ethnicity, and that that could be due to kind of inconsistency in language use today. And historically to describe race, which often combines people's nationality ethnicity and sometimes religion, but also that there might be a correlation between the demographic of the archive sector record specialists as being primarily predominantly white. And so kind of that erasure being a part of that lack of awareness around this more like lived experience. Most of the investigation so far on the sort of work really focused on racism and offensive language and records, and that there was a strong appetite from the public as well as within the sector for more stories about people of color and records across the UK and the wider world. And particularly beyond this idea of the extraordinary, the first, the last, the best people were kind of looking for more stories of everyday representation. And that when ethnicity is not listed there was an unacknowledged assumption that the record subject was white. I quickly kind of identified that there were three major stakeholders in this groups in this research, those who are being represented. And so their experience of their racial identity and ethnicity and culture outside of an ambition to racism was something that was going to sell central to the project. So kind of capturing the pain and the joy, but also the mundanity, the mundanity and excellence. This is often in terms of some anti racism practices and the colonial practice, this idea of endpoint where everybody is allowed to be mediocre, and that we don't that different groups don't have to be twice as good to take up the same amount of space. And that's a rhetoric that's really strong within different communities of color. So I wanted to explore kind of that element of how we capture beyond the kind of excellence and explorations of self description and changing language within that. This often manifests in changing based on trends based on geographies and people's kind of where they're raised different kind of cultures across the world and the different language histories, and the uses of those different words in different spaces, but also different generations within same communities. So the language is is ever evolving in this quite complex because of this. The second stakeholder group was those searching for diverse representation. So these are researchers, students, news reporters. Anyone really kind of wanting to find evidence of longer history of diversity and wanting results, primarily based on kind of contemporary language. These might be people who are not particularly aware of archival practice and standard. Really young people, and those who are not necessarily prepared to or if they are prepared to, it's still kind of damaging to encounter kind of racial discrimination as a language that they have to navigate to find these histories, and who might kind of fall back on the use of tropes to find more expected narratives and these sorts of tropes might be easier to find on a Google search than they would be in an archive setting. And then thirdly, those who are responsible for the cataloging. So those who want to create a usable data set whose practices involves questioning the relevance of information that they're adding into the data and might find that they caught up in that the question of is somebody's racial identity relevant to the narrative, so should I include it or not, and confusion, who might have confusion over the choice of language to make, especially when it's been changing and you're looking at historical data versus contemporary data. And those who are facing the reality of this information, especially historically, it's highly likely that it's not known. And that that might require some investigation and that question of who is kind of creating that racial term is this one looking at records for the transatlantic slavery who is determining somebody's race and whose voice do we want to privilege can add to a lot of complexities. And the idea of this kind of mix of ethnicity, race, nationality, and sometimes religion kind of creating this confusion and the homogeneity of things like BAME is a term, making things harder to kind of untangle into specificity and affecting people's confidence and the vocabulary on racialized experiences and their significance. So there were sort of three main concepts that also affected my research. One where this idea of design justice principles when exploring sort of the database I wanted to explore concepts of justice and design and and the questions of algorithms and AI kind of came up a little bit but little bit later. I'm not hugely confident in a lot of that, but I, the sort of idea of the systems being created to replicate the exploitations in society was really important to be to be mindful of. I was really influenced by black feminism and anti capitalism ideas, exploring how these different modes of supremacy kind of affect to the way that information has been captured but also the ways that we have been built assumptions about what this information means when it's there or not there and when to include it. But also the really important understanding of looking for joy and pleasure as a form of resistance and self care to to be mindful that you know different racial identities are not kind of only existing as oppositions to this reality of racism or the experience of racism, but that there's you know people have a lot of joy and the kind of just their experience of themselves and their body and making space for that. And then queer theory and querying was really important in the idea of challenging hatch normativity or challenging kind of this idea of a normative standard that might have more applications or assumptions. And the sort of binary other that is kind of sit sat in in in opposition but not necessarily brought to the forefront of people's minds, and sort of a nuanced approach to absence that has been practiced a lot when looking at kind of queer figures throughout time. And yeah this idea that there's no set normal just constantly changing normal norms. I'm going to go through now with just the three main kind of questions that and finding things that I kind of came through my research and I'm going to end on the recommendations that I'm starting to form. So the first one was sort of this, this main ethical question. And it was how do we approach addressing user needs for discoverable discoverable figures from racial minority communities in UK archives. And how do we balance in this responsibility to record subjects. So again it's this quite idea of what's the difference between our legal responsibility and ethical responsibility and changing identities and changing minds being really important for living subjects. So we kind of sit when to sit alongside ideas of the right to be forgotten when we're dealing with living subjects but also those who have passed and their families. And I never really kind of cracked this one except to really come to this idea of making sure that it's where people are living that they are involved in the conversations that we are capturing the ways they represent themselves describe themselves. The considerations they have and maybe different versions of their identity, as they've, you know, if their, their identity has changed through their life how to capture this. There was a lot of stronger research kind of on being undertaken in this area around transgender narratives and people's changing kind of identity in the record. And I would suggest kind of going through that and kind of building upon that more with the idea of racial identities. It kind of came a lot more into language around offensive terms and how we dealt with that. But I hadn't seen space for looking at things like the nuance of people from the Caribbean kind of, you know, starting with our elders wanting to say West Indian and then Caribbean and the more specific islands as people kind of dealt into that. But what I did find was that there wasn't really a thesaurus that allowed kind of that minutiae anyways there in terms of the history that I was finding the languages that I was finding in the records. The minutiae came about offensive words there was there's a lot of specificity in different kinds of offensive terminology, but not really that specificity of kind of hybrid identities, people who hyphenate their their names. When I did a lot of the kind of self description work, people often wanted to kind of include a hyphen that I was this plus this plus this, but also maybe even like a note that this is how they identified but they had these tensions with some of what that might mean. Particularly this came about when subjects were trying to explore their relationship with with being English and identifying with that that word and the identity and what the applications had been in terms of other racial life spaces. I sort of came to the conclusion that our ability to change what we do changes when people die, less so than our ethical responsibility. So, while someone isn't alive, we should take as much opportunity as possible to try and be as ethical as we can be because the opportunity for that and the clarity for people's own self expression changes our ability to do that changes when they're no longer living. The second area was this idea of evolving language and self description. So, this idea of what changes when subjects self describe versus ticking boxes that we have. And the main issue with that is that the data gets more complicated it's more fluid, you get lots of different combinations we've tried this with live records with with live data for people who are visiting our services and we're able to find that. For example, if we had like a homogenous group that would normally read as sort of just white, like British Irish Welsh within that kind of tab that once we created this option for multiple identities ticking multiple boxes and self description that whilst that group would normally is one data set that that actually could turn into 125 different combinations of ways people would identify, which is really beautiful in one way because it allows that space to understand the complexities of different people's identity. But it's also more difficult to look from a data managing perspective and being able to return usable data sets it's really important to have multiple to have kind of larger groups. And I guess the kind of conclusion I'm drawing with that is that we can have both, if we can try and keep the overarching kind of tick box that we normally have in our collection, as well as space for the more nuances then we'd be able to still recall the relevant records would also be able to provide a little bit more insight into how someone might describe. We know that there's a lot of change in terms of this practice around language and what can be seen as offensive and problematic. And I use some examples on screen. But kind of exploring when we're this idea of self description and reclaiming language as being kind of an interesting problem to for archives to consider. So what happens when someone is self describing and we're able to capture that within the record and they want to reclaim potentially hurtful words as a form of empowerment within their practice. But how this is read when it's in our databases and kind of perceived as the institutional voice using some of this language. Because it's really important to me to not sort of tell people how to describe themselves, which I'm sure a lot of us agree on. But then kind of what happens with that to translate that to users versus the record subjects is kind of an important and interesting debate. And I'm sure lots of different ways to do that with different content notes but just flagging that there. And yet the idea kind of what context would be needed to showcase self descriptions within the archival setting. So how could we make it clear that what a user is reading or the words of the person rather than of the archivist and how we can make more space for a multi locality. I know there are lots of different practices and doing that. So I'd be interested to kind of do further research in this area. I was really kind of influenced by the idea of algorithmic redlining and marginalized histories. And the idea that if a marginalized narrative marginalized community is not sort of forefronted within the design process that evidence shows that these are the becomes the most inaccessible resources that are created because we're not naming the barriers which things need to kind of come overcome. And this sort of explains lots of different design history such as why seat belts are less safe for women because it wasn't identified to kind of consider female bodies as as explicitly needing to be kind of included in the design process. And an example of how airport security scanners are very trans exclusive because the process of identifying whether somebody is suspicious or not meets basically has a gender binary involved in it. So the person looking at the screen has to compare what they see in person versus what's scanned and if they don't match that makes you suspicious which is obviously very trans exclusive for people. And this question which is permeates throughout a lot of this research is where does offensive language sit. This has been explored in lots of different ways by lots of different practitioners. But they do return a lot arch set of relevant records. And it's really important that this in history still really visible. But how do we make it so that more people are aware that this is what's happening that the offensive language is sitting sort of in the algorithms we create for kind of our instructions to search engines. What do we do when that language emerges and where do we put the content notes is something that's really important to within this work and then how our database is functioning based on how they can how they're designed. So how did the data set emerge. So how can we co design new systems based on principles of design justice that allowed us include more representation of diverse racial identities in more complex ways. And how people's race affects their lives. So this question of is a significant or relevant information being a conversation that we have with people. But also maybe that there is a more uniformed approach that we take to capturing people's identity when we have record subjects that we're adding into our collection. And then finally there was this big question overarching within that kind of influence of black feminist practice was is there space to talk about race without racism. I was really, I was really struck by when I looked through Clarissa's choose work that there were 935 terms that she'd identified that were potentially offensive. And when I looked through the UK cathedrals, I kept finding sort of these synonyms for how these terms had kind of come about which were clearly that clearly been derived from the histories that they were cataloging, but we're quite upsetting when looked at in just sort of their raw data. So for example the term mixed race as a synonym of social problems. And that's something that is not the kind of be all and end all of being mixed race. And there wasn't really space for these other kind of synonyms, things like love or complexity or you know, more more reality of what that life that that looks like isn't present. Because what we've kind of found is that a lot of the archive narratives because of this kind of first extraordinary is talking about people overcoming or their race being kind of mentioned as kind of an encounter of racism, whether it's a positive sort of overcoming racism or a negative kind of narrative of capturing racism. And, yeah, just wanted to find out how do we create these spaces for joy, and this mundanity. And so the process of the mundane for me was kind of built into this idea of if we create a uniform approach, where with all record subjects we cry and make them capture their racial identity. And if we don't we put in the words unknown, so that it becomes more of distant ad hoc info information that we're added into the system, but also kind of considering things that we have in regular processes now when working with people of preferred not to say where someone wants to keep their racial identity when they're living out of the story, but that we have more of a uniform approach that we're able to kind of find these spaces for the diversity of race without racism, being kind of the center of it. Within that question was also this really important one which is how to find space, a language and a source that includes whiteness, that we don't create this and make it this invisible norm, which all other races kind of deviate from. We have spaces for kind of that interrogation of some of these complex relationships with things like English identity and kind of racial identities within that but also that makes space for the nuances and of kind of the white experience as well. And the white experience not kind of being homogenized in the same way that all other racial identities have been kind of homogenized. And so these were just my like final, my working resources, recommendations at the moment. So the source of vocabulary and databases are only really accessible if you understand history of race relations in the UK, if you also understand how archives function, but they're not really useful for discovery purposes. So school age researchers looking to find narratives of like a black female historical figure would find it very difficult to kind of find that within the archive, without kind of going to explicit learning resources, but kind of just kind of into database itself. And so, because of this and lack of awareness, there's much more of a turn to search engines like Google, and within kind of algorithms of oppression and all the research we've looked at, the kind of capitalist influences of those spaces means that we're really kind of returning something that has its own kind of bias based search. So as archives, we can try to provide more of a space with from kind of that sponsored search engine type approach. And then the current resources that we have are based on histories on bias, bias histories and bias ideas of what's significant and not. And so they don't really holistically could consider different interests that users might have today, or historically. And so we do need to have interventions in the database with that kind of understanding built in. And if we understand that say that race is a social construct. That's really important kind of frame this, but it means that a lot of the identities that we're going to be finding in the records that are complex and multifaceted with nationalities and ethnicities. That these identities were often forged through kind of necessity and sometimes violence. But they're often really important sources of pride and unity and resistance. So we want to make space to kind of talk about that complex on reality. And so to record creators my my current recommendations are if the subject is living seek their self description because they'll have more longevity. And you're able to kind of practice these ethical approach that we can seek to collectively design the search queries and taxonomies that incorporate race with people from different race identity racial ethnicities. That we don't assume right whiteness if the race is absent, and that we don't apply and assume right whiteness so by not including or indicating ethnicities when they're known. And the subject is white. And then to consider joy and Monday in relation to racialized experiences so not just focusing on this history of pain and discrimination or excellence, but also trying to find ways that we can make we can challenge normative assumptions by kind of making the information about different people more normal as well. I'm going to stop sharing here the rest of the slides just my bibliography. So thank you very much, Rachel. So we'll move on to questions now if Jenny, Holly and Rachel want to come back on screen. If you've got if anyone watching has any questions do feel free to submit those in the queue and a button. Just under 15 minutes for this and we've got a few questions in already so I'll work through those that have been submitted. The first one is for Jenny, which is will there's two parts to this question. So first one is will you be publishing your findings and the second is, are you able to say which models you looked at even though the transcripts are embargoed. Take the first part first easiest one to deal with. Yes, I have got some plans to publish my research. I gave a presentation on some of the archival theory at the end of last year and I've got a chapter proposal in for that so hopefully that will come to something and if it doesn't I will look at other opportunities to publish that. I would like to write up other parts of my fellowship. But yeah, it's a bit TBC at the moment, I'm afraid. In terms of models of practice. I've had a look at some of the approaches to surveying. So looking at how archival surveying is traditionally done and how that could be varied. I've looked quite a lot at models of community collecting and I suppose different variations on similar themes. So where the support given to community groups with either equipment or training and definitely looking at more of a post custodial model for that kind of approach. I've also looked at some of the relationships and how those relationships. I suppose are navigated and negotiated and renegotiated between groups and repositories and whether it's an advisory relationship or whether it's based on depositing material in a recognised repository. And I've also looked a little bit at activists and how activist groups manage their archives and how that might develop and change over time as the activist group changes over time. Excellent, thank you. The next question I believe came in for Holly, but might be relevant to all of our panel. And it's how do different organisations determine which terms are sensitive. Which is a bit of a tricky question I admit. It's incredibly subjective and it's very hard to approach how you as an individual organisation is going to go about it. The first time I was working on offensive language works was when I was working on a different collection. It was kind of a rural life and heritage collection. So I guess the terminology in that is going to be very different from the terminology that's in the women's archive. And so I guess weighing in what your collection specifically goes into so having cataloged a lot of the women's collection I know some of the sensitive material and terminology that they use so I kind of know what to search for. I guess the radical empathy approach is one where you look at various things that could be sensitive even if you don't find them sensitive or offensive potentially someone else does. And then the other end of the spectrum is maybe not flagging anything and just having an overarching umbrella policy that says you might come across sensitive offensive terminology. So there's a huge spectrum of how you can approach it and my research basically showed that everyone's doing it differently. And we're all just trying our best to figure it out. But yeah, it's tricky especially when you're sat trying to think of offensive or sensitive terms to search for which is like a really horrible part of the workflow but unfortunately is quite an important part for flagging the records. So I don't think that answers it. Does anyone else have the answer? No, I think that there were there's a certain understanding of that there's some words that are like obviously offensive in almost every context, and those are much easier to kind of deal with. But when you get to certain terms, it's kind of a lot more confusing and those are where we have a lot of the issues. But yeah, I think part of the consideration people have is the size of their collection and the backlog it would take and the labor it would take to kind of do individual responses versus more of a blanket approach. And there's also this question of telling people that something is going to upset them. I think in it might not so there's some approaches to just as much detail content notes as you can have around what might be included in the types of history that is going to be seen in the record and hoping that that provides enough context that people are aware that maybe the words might not be offensive, but the kind of the content is still heavy, because sometimes people can really use non offensive terms but the collection still needs to be treated in a similar way in that you might do something that was like offensive in it. Thank you. So we've been on to the next question is another one for you. Holly and kind of features around the your story event. So there's a few parts to this question. So first one, how did you capture the feedback from the event. Did you transcribe the conversation so they're ready to use. Will the documented conversations stored in the archive. So it was definitely. One of the first steps is figuring out how we were going to do it. So what we ended up doing was a very simplistic farm, which was basically spaced to jot down what you were talking about. And also a space for either the name or the organization of the person. And I also included an area to capture the signature of the person that kind of said I consent for this information to potentially be used for future exhibitions or the catalogue. It was a bit of a caveat at the bottom. So that's what we settled on and there was definitely pros and cons to it. We didn't actually sometimes you couldn't get a signature because it was quite a free flowing casual conversation and sometimes it's a bit jarring to then be like, can you sign this farm, especially when you're having quite sensitive conversations sometimes. So it was an invite event. So we do have the contact details of the organizations that came so that's something we can deal with another way. But yet the idea of jotting down things when you're having a conversation is quite unnatural because you want to really encourage these people to share often quite personal stuff. You know, contact and things like that and it seems rude sometimes to kind of be using a clipboard, which is quite a far more way of doing it. But we managed to keep it quite casual and and just jot it down quite freehand. The different things we were talking about. And so this was then collated at the end all of the sheets of paper of our various volunteers. And then I've typed them all up into one Word document. So I think that is the first part of the thing. How did we catch a feedback? Second, yeah, we transcribed it so it's all in one document. And then how this is going to be starred is a big question. So one of the things with current databases is they're quite traditionally archive related whether isn't the space to put things like user generated content are perhaps more stringently archive facts, dates, creators. So in the past I know that things like the revisiting collections initiative, they found problems with this I've just seen the time I'm rambling on for ages, but basically I think we're going to put it in the narratives module of emu. It's a way of connecting to different catalog records. It's a good way of starring it, but this isn't viewable on the online catalog. There's flaws in every way of doing this but hopefully we can sign purse that this information is available and we can use it ourselves and things like blog person stuff like that. Talking for ages sorry. Not a problem at all. So this questions for Jenny and kind of revolves around acceptance in Lou. And if you have any sense that the scheme will change and become more inclusive, particularly looking at the need of having to fund an official valuation upfront, which can potentially act as a barrier. I suppose I'm acceptance in Lou was kind of the starting point for my research. But ultimately I didn't really look at this a huge amount in the end. I would say for my knowledge of the scheme it's unlikely to change in the future. It kind of is what it is. But there are other schemes and maybe it's it's looking at making the best use of those and also raising awareness of some of the other schemes that are available, such as what's the cultural gift scheme. I think there's also a lot of the schemes use quite similar criteria. So the reviewing committee on exports of works of art and objects of cultural interest. A lot of them use similar criteria based on the Waverley criteria. And I think that definitely these criteria are not used to cover as as wide a range of collections as I think they could be. I think you could definitely make the case collections to be accepted under some of these schemes that aren't at the moment. I think there's also a big issue around communication and knowledge of these a lot of these schemes. Because generally it's the really well known high profile things that get the press coverage and a lot of archive creators archivists themselves don't know about putting material forward for schemes probably as much as they should do. But yeah, this this was an avenue of my research that I started to consider. And then we didn't I didn't progress with it. And so just looked at it in the early days. Somebody else might be able to give a better answer on acceptance and new at the National Archives. But yeah, from my perspective, I don't I don't see it changing anytime soon. Excellent. Thank you. Just wary of time as we're coming quite close to the end and still got a few questions to run through. So potentially fairly quick answers. Another one for you, Jenny, do you think the preservation of context can sometimes be a hindrance for non dominant archival collections, especially if they don't have the space slash resources when building their collection in the first place. As an interesting point, it's not something that came up in any of my interviews. A lot of particularly the activist groups were really interested in capturing a lot of that context and the sort of information that sat around things. It might be less formal than archive practitioners. So the dreaded post it note. Stuck onto things explaining the context of creation and sort of giving some of its background. So I'd say it's not something I came across. I'll give a quick answer. Okay, thank you. And this one from Rachel looking at glossaries and whether there is a difference of emphasis emphasis where some glossaries emphasize problematic terminology and others inclusive terminology. Kind of looking through the question, whether it's an idea around universal self descriptions and languages of empowerment empowerment. But is there a case focus in honor the source of racism as the most urgent aspect of redressing vast catalogs and outdated and harmful information. Taking that larger point, I think that there is a lot of research going on around source of racism and that's what I found that there is actually quite an interesting amount of energy going into that field. But that that that what's coming up is that this is really emotionally laborious work for working with different people from different with who this is a reality of their lived experience for that's quite difficult but we're trying to include that in designing the process. But that even those collections that were sort of based on in communities of color that have this idea of joy being the foundation of it to the language still is really hurtful and there too. And that there is still some there's what's missing is the conversational language or the reality that people from these communities actually have about talking about themselves their identity. Their experiences in a way that isn't centered on kind of the kind of the racist stereotypes or jokes or, you know, they're more kind of based in reality. Holly mentioned it around communities externally being perceived as silent but actually within those communities language they use to describe themselves or their experiences is not does not subscribe to that and we're not capturing that language. And possibly this means that we need to be capturing things outside of English more so that we're able to capture that because it could be that some of this is the translation into a Eurocentric perspective on different people's experiences across the world, but also it could just be that in terms of the information that exists in the records, what we're mostly capturing anyways is harmful records, records of kind of the reality of race and racism, as this and that there is a big piece of urgent work around that in anti racism practice. But I really want to see if we're designing things for people about themselves about their own experiences that we, it would be different. I think the focus on kind of making racism visible is something that is a practice that's focused towards people who don't understand that racism, like the reality of racism as a personal experience. And so, if we recenter who the collection is for the language would also have to include more joy, more empathy. Thank you. So last couple of questions, and this one's kind of all three of you. So would any of you consider applying for research grants to further your work as a result of the fellowship. So I'll look at my screen and go to the first Holly. I think mine has been quite a practical fellowship. So I'm in a short term contract work and an externally funded project for the women's archive and this fellowship has been a great thing to do alongside that. So it's allowed me to dive a little bit deeper into things around inclusive cataloging so it's been a great side by side with my project archivist role. So that's how I viewed my fellowship and I don't think that necessarily branch out into grant work but I know the others are maybe more research centered so maybe you guys will I'll move down to Jenny next. I think I don't know if I need to apply for a formal grant. I have used this as an opportunity to we get 10% time at work for a professional development and I've used this as to basically ring fence my 10% time, which generally I was terrible at doing. I found that the structure of this fellowship was really great at motivating me to actually do what I said I do rather than procrastinate or find something else that was very urgent to do and do that instead. I am going to attempt to continue some of my working structure. So to carry on some of my research and look at some of the things that came up from my fellowship and how but probably take them in a slightly more work centered way. So looking a bit more at how we manage our data on accessions and looking a bit probably at practically how we might look at participatory collecting and engaging with communities and things like that. In the next year or two, I probably wouldn't be applying for anything formally. But I would like to use the structure of my working week to allow me to continue exploring some of these and definitely writing up so whether it's in professional journals or whether it's more through some of our. We've got SACs, which is short form articles so I'm using that a bit more regularly than I have them. Thank you. I'm finally Rachel. Probably not because I'm sure I've struggled to kind of ring fence my time for this. And while research is really important in terms of my practice, I think I work better in kind of this isn't the problem that I need to research to solve in a more ad hoc way. But it's it's something I hope all the people are building on and I want to help more people do the research. I think that's where I'd love to be. I'd like to kind of remain that somebody who can amplify this work and help those who have more time and more space to kind of really delve down some of the rabbit holes that kept emerging.