Band Aids or Workers Control – some reflections from the BLDS Legacy on the current controversy
We’ve been prompted to write this post by the recent controversy around the 40th anniversary of Band Aid – with the re-release of ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas’ having provoked criticism from Africans both on the continent and in the diaspora. In his Guardian article (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/03/criticism-bob-geldof-band-aid-charity-single-africa-caused-storm-fuse-odg) Fuse ODG complains that the single ‘inadvertently contributed to…
DISCUS-Library Joint Project to apply AI tools to the Camel Forum Working Papers from the Somali Academy of Sciences and Arts
The aim of this post is just to give a very quick overview of a joint project between the Library and the Data-Intensive Science Centre at the University of Sussex (DISCUS). This began with a successful proposal to the 2024 Development Studies Association (DSA) conference by Danny Millum, Paul Gilbert and Alice Corble, to run…
Exploring different approaches to using Tricontinental and Mujeres in your research from a library perspective
A little belatedly we wanted to write up the details of the ‘Exploring different approaches to using Tricontinental and Mujeres in your research from a library perspective’ workshop, which took place on Monday 22 April in the Global Studies Resource Centre. It was organised as part of the ongoing EIF (Education and Innovation Fund) sponsored…
Aesthetics of the BLDS Collection: Indian Graphic Design
by Elsa van Helfteren Following our previous blog post on the graphic design from Cuba within the BLDS collection, we would now like to share with you the artwork and graphics coming from India throughout the 1960s, 70s and 80s. These intricate designs harp back to the traditional Indian block printing method as well as…
Student Researchers in the BLDS Legacy Collection: Tricontinental, Mujeres, and the Worlds they Invite us to Imagine
The BLDS Legacy team are delighted to announce that they have received funding from the University of Sussex Education and Innovation Fund for the project ‘Student Researchers in the BLDS Legacy Collection: Tricontinental, Mujeres, and the Worlds they Invite us to Imagine’. In this project, we aim to engage students with the British Library for…
Aesthetics of the BLDS Collection: Cuban Graphic Design
by Elsa van Helfteren One of the strengths of the British Library for Development Studies Legacy Collection is how it illustrates the evolution of graphic design across the Global South. The aesthetics of the collection vary from country to country and across decades, but the Collections team here at Sussex have been particularly impressed by…
Oil Crisis or Oil Revolution? Using the Sussex Library collections to explore contrasting contemporary Global South and Global North views of the October 1973 OPEC embargo
by Beth Collard and Danny Millum Before we start – a confession. This title and thesis (such as it is!) of this month’s post has been almost completely plagiarised from The Dig podcast episode ‘The Rise of OPEC’. In it Giuliano Garavini talks about how while the oil consuming nations of the Global North saw…
Reimagining non-alignment
This post by Nimi Hoffman, a South African academic who works at the University of Sussex, draws on materials from the BLDS Legacy Collection. It was originally published on the Africa Is a Country website (https://africasacountry.com/2023/09/reimagining-non-alignment) and has been republished with their kind permission under their Creative Commons license. I find myself reflecting again and…
Re-discovering and mapping the BLDS Legacy Collection through global metadata space and time
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…
‘Podrán cortar todas las flores, pero no podrán detener la primavera’: the legacy of the Chilean coup in the Sussex Library collections
This September marks the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup of 1973, which saw the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically-elected left-wing government and its replacement by a military dictatorship. Looking back, this is a key moment for all manner of reasons, including the failure of ‘the democratic road to socialism’, the subsequent involvement of the…
BLDS Legacy Collection Workshop and Discussion – 17 May 2023
In May this year a really positive and inspiring workshop based on the BLDS Legacy Collection (and funded by the Sussex Higher Education Innovation Fund (HEIF)) took place. Organised by Paul Gilbert from Global Studies and Danny Millum from the Library, the event was in two parts. The morning featured presentations from a number of researchers…
Using the BLDS Legacy Collection to research occupational injuries in India
Why does the Government of India put out so many different statistical publications with uninformative names and overlapping information?! And why is none of them consistent over time in terms of what it contains?! I sound grumpy, but it’s actually been an entertaining (if exhausting!) detective chase for me over the last year or so,…
Launching the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS) Legacy Collection
There has been a secret treasure trove lurking in the basement of the Institute of Development Studies building, adjoining the University of Sussex Library – secret, until now. We are delighted to be launching publicly the British Library for Development Studies (BLDS) Legacy Collection, a fantastically rich collection of documents tracking the history of 20th century…
Freedom Day – new perspectives on apartheid from the BLDS Legacy Collection
Today marks the 28th anniversary of South Africa’s first post-apartheid elections, now commemorated as Freedom Day. Previously, under the apartheid regime, non-whites in general had only limited voting rights, while black South Africans were unable to vote at all. The 1994 elections were the first non-racial national elections where everyone over the age of 18…
Public opinion and conflict in South Asia
A brief look at the Bangladesh Liberation War through the holdings of the BLDS Legacy Collection One of the main aims of the British Library for Development Studies Legacy Collection (BLDS) project is outreach and promotion. As part of this we are assisting with some teaching sessions at Sussex in order to demonstrate both the…
We’ll meet again – or how I gambled away Vera Lynn’s autograph and ended up in a Zambian jungle with a bunch of hippies…
By Danny Millum – BLDS Metadata and Discovery Officer Normally when you tell your family / friends about what you do, unless you’re a fireman or a nurse they just zone out (especially when your job title is Metadata Discovery Officer). But it really seems as if the BLDS was actually my genetic destiny, as…
You think blended flex with a touch of hybridity is tough? Try a Soviet-era correspondence course
By Danny Millum – BLDS Metadata and Discovery Officer One of the many consequences of the pandemic has been to accelerate the development and adoption of new teaching methods, with all the associated stress for teachers and students of having to hurriedly adapt to new approaches and new buzzwords. It’s hard to know which has…
Well that’s a lot of pamphlets….
BLDS Legacy Collection By Caroline Marchant-Wallis – BLDS Metadata and Discovery Officer I was chatting to my Librarian mentor recently about how we approached starting the BLDS Legacy Collection project, and I realised it was a good question. What did we do? Having been caught up in the whirlwind of the project for the past…
Reading the history of Zimbabwean independence from airline annual reports in the BLDS Legacy Collection
By Danny Millum – BLDS metadata and discovery officer One of the many strengths of the BLDS Legacy Collection lies in its holdings of annual reports, from both government departments and public and private companies. While obviously vital source material for business and economic historians, these might appear a little dry to others, but on…
‘For security reasons it may not be prudent to unfold where I am’ – Ghana’s 1978 electoral commissioner’s letter from hiding surfaces in the BLDS Legacy collection
By Danny Millum – BLDS Metadata and Discovery Officer Cataloguing on the BLDS Legacy Collection project has now reached Ghana, and we’ve just unearthed a fascinating letter from a dramatic time in that country’s political history. On 30 March 1978 the country’s Supreme Military Council, led by Col. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, held a referendum on…
Football, poetry and fables -the surprising features in BLDS African port harbour magazines
By Danny Millum – BLDS Metadata and discovery officer There are many fascinating rabbit holes to explore in the BLDS Legacy Collection, and you often come across them in the most unexpected places. Perhaps this just shows our limited imagination, but when we first came across a run of journals relating to different African ports…
‘Like a child in a candy store’ Gerardo Serra delves into the BLDS Legacy Collection
Before the spleen of writing, editing (and re-writing and re-editing) sets in, there is a fleeting moment in which the historian is like a child in a candy store, starry-eyed and gleefully lost. I experienced such a moment when, in 2016, I walked into the basement of what was then the British Library for Development…
The British Library for Development Studies Legacy Collection 