The Project

In March 2019 it was announced that the University of Sussex (UoS) Library and The Institute of Development Studies (IDS) had been awarded a Wellcome Trust grant of over £400,000 to improve the accessibility of the British Library of Development Studies (BLDS), with the aim being to create an invaluable and enduring research resource for a new generation of scholars.

This followed the commission of a scoping survey and collections audit and a cataloguing survey for BLDS, both conducted in May 2017.

The decision was taken to create a new BLDS Legacy Collection (full details of the collection can be found here), with a Library Project Team taking on responsibility for the appraisal, cataloguing, and preservation of the materials as well as the refurbishment of the storage space, and IDS (who remain owners of the Collection) providing valuable academic guidance and promotion via the Academic Advisory Board.

When the BLDS Legacy Collection Project commenced in October 2019 the majority of the collection was uncatalogued and largely inaccessible, as well as being stored in conditions unsuited to its long-term preservation.

Over the following three years, the team:

produced a comprehensive listing of the original holdings (over 1.3m items, across over 150 countries, in 90 languages)
devised and implemented (in conjunction with the Academic Advisory Board) a rigorous set of disposal criteria and processes to withdraw from the collection material widely held elsewhere or online, refining the new BLDS Legacy Collection to c250,000 rare or unique items
created a series bespoke BLDS Legacy themes to assign to these items
catalogued and classified the entire collection to Library of Congress standards, creating in the process over 35,000 new catalogue records (NB many records cover multiple items, as in the case of journals, census runs etc), all freely available to search via the University of Sussex Library Alma catalogue
uploaded browsable sets for every theme and every country to the University of Sussex Library Primo Collections database
reboxed, rehoused and preserved all 250,000 items
refurbished the basement space where the Collection is held, as with funding from the University of Sussex (and working alongside Estates and Facilities) the space was completely ripped out and brand new roller-racking stacks installed
organised and oversaw the complete removal offsite and return of the entire Collection to allow for this refurbishment
promoted the collection extensively via social media, regular blog posts and conference appearances and events
sought to ensure that the principles of library decolonisation were applied at every stage of the project, including the creation of the BLDS Legacy themes, the application of cataloguing metadata and the re-ordering of the collection

By the end of the project in February 2023, the entirety of the BLDS Legacy Collection was fully catalogued and available via the University of Sussex Library, completely rehoused in a refurbished environment and has been widely promoted to UK and international academics, researchers and students.

The next stage will be start to address issues of access, which are especially relevant in the context of a collection of Global South materials held in the Global North. While cost considerations have thus far ruled out the possibility of a wholescale digitisation of the collection, the plan is to offer a form of ‘scan on demand’, and in scoping areas of particular interest/scarcity for discrete digitisation projects. If you have feedback on this please do contact us at library.collections@sussex.ac.uk.