As part of their work on the BLDS Legacy Maps and Spheres Project, Alice Corble , Tim Graves and Danny Millum presented a lightning talk to the 2023 CILIP MDG Conference – the talk itself is above, and the abstract follows!
The talk discusses the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS) Legacy Collection, a unique assembly of over 250,000 items from 150 countries in the Global South, collected from the 1960s to the 1990s. The collection includes diverse materials like government reports, journals, and pamphlets, covering areas like economics, health, and education. While many of these materials exist elsewhere, the BLDS collection is unparalleled in its comprehensiveness. The Wellcome Trust has funded a project to preserve and promote this collection. The talk also delves into the challenges of cataloguing such a vast collection, especially when considering colonial influences and Eurocentric epistemology. Visualizations of the data reveal patterns in the collection’s distribution and growth. The speakers emphasize the importance of decolonizing library collections and understanding the geopolitical power of naming and mapping through colonial and post-colonial perspectives. They advocate for cross-departmental collaboration to create more inclusive systems of knowledge.
PS For a longer piece from Alice check out this post on her Decolonial Maps of Library Learning blog.
The British Library for Development Studies Legacy Collection 