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Inclusive Reading List Toolkit

Selection of artefacts from Archives and Special Collections

Engaging with heritage collections to foster inclusivity and diversity

The use of Special Collections and Archives plays an important role in improving diversity and inclusion in both education and research. Engaging with heritage collections at a critical level can help identify and expose unjustly underrepresented voices and communities, and increase the range of narratives and perspectives documented in such collections.

Heritage collections reflect the historical context in which they were created. The voices that resonate within them tend to belong to people who, in those contexts, wielded power and authority. This is evidenced not only by the documents and records themselves, but in the way collections are organised, the provenance of the materials they hold, and the language used to describe them - all providing testimony to histories of injustice and atrocities perpetrated against marginalised communities and individuals.

This is why searching for diverse voices in heritage collections is not straightforward.

Searching for diverse voices in heritage collections

When using keywords and subject terms to search or browse heritage collections, it is important to consider that the metadata describing the records might be ‘not inclusive' and marred by implicit bias. For example, the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) - although widely used to catalogue heritage collections, and subject to a constant rigorous process of review and revision - is recognised as including “inaccurate, outdated, or non-preferred terms to describe groups and individuals”, as well as using a language that leaves marginalized peoples invisible (Clark and Smith 2022, p.561).

Using historical terminology which reflects specific contexts as search terms, can help surface diversity otherwise hidden in documents and records. Chew’s Inclusive Terminology Glossary, the Research Guide to Sources for the Study of Minority Ethnic History (PDF, 1.53mb), and the Research Guide to Sources for the Study of LGBT History are excellent examples of tools which use historical terminology to reveal diversity and support the wider interpretation of heritage collections.

Collections which display Local Contexts notices and/or Labels will be valuable sources of records representing Indigenous Knowledges. You can refer to the Local Contexts Hub website to browse a wide range of collections noted on the Projects Board. King’s is directly involved in the work of Local Contexts through the Europe & UK Network which is chaired by a member of the Special Collections team.

King’s Archives and the Foyle Special Collections Library

King’s Archives and Special Collections hold a diverse range of unique heritage materials, which can inspire the creation of new modules and enrich scholarship activities engaged with marginalised voices. The breadth of experiences, narratives, and events documented by these collections is remarkably varied.

Person in archives reading room consulting papers

King’s Archives has stewardship and custodianship of two repositories which are continually growing. The College Archives record the history of King’s College London; its teaching, learning and research activities, and its merged institutions since its foundation. The Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives holds personal collections of senior British military personnel. Each repository contributes to documenting the history of British imperialism and colonialism and consequently holds material evidencing practices of racism, misogyny, and homophobia.

A researcher consulting rare books propped on pillows with snake weights

The Foyle Special Collections Library holds an extensive collection of over 200,000 items, including many rare books, manuscripts, maps, prints, photographs, and other materials that are considered to be valuable or important because of their age, rarity, condition, or provenance. Particular strengths include theology, exploration, Empire and Commonwealth, languages, medicine, psychiatry, science and natural history.

The largest collection held by King’s is the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) Historical Library, which contains the historical libraries of FCDO predecessor departments, including the Colonial Office, and spans 500 years of world history. The FCDO collection is an important collection as it provides an extensive and unique coverage of the British Empire, from its origins to its maintenance and ending. The collection also covers other empires, including Ottoman, French and Portuguese. As well as providing a British perspective on Empire and Colonialism, the collection also holds a range of voices from various backgrounds and parts of the world. Research has been undertaken to uncover these hidden voices of empire; however, there remains many voices left to be uncovered within this collection.

Using our collections in your reading list

It is widely acknowledged that, as new areas of digital practice emerge within research and education, the role played by digital collections becomes ever more critical. The transformation of King’s collections into data has been enabling dissemination and reuse of our unique resources at scale. To facilitate the asynchronous and remote access to content that is needed to fully support scholarly activities, we have increased the online availability of our digital collections and developed interactive environments where you and your students can engage with our resources directly.

To deliver the ambition of our Open Library strategy, we have increased the range of our heritage collection-focused services to develop genuinely open and inclusive collections, and to improve discoverability and widen access to our resources. But we are mindful of our responsibility as ethical stewards of the collections we hold, and conscious of the sensitivity of some of our documents and records. When we digitise and publish material online - making it more publicly available - we minimise the risk of harming individuals and communities who might feel they are mis- or under-represented within our collections.

You can search for items located in the Foyle Special Collections Library through King's Library Search and for King’s Archives’ collections via the Archive Catalogues.

Recommended sources for King’s Archives and Special Collections unique materials

The JSTOR Open Community Collections is a pilot project in which resources we have digitised from our collections are made freely available on this platform. The material currently accessible to the public in the JSTOR site has been selected from a broad range of collections, including the Alanbrooke collection, the Embleton collection, the Feasey Collection, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office Historical Collection, the Zadik collection, the Marsden collection, the Phillips collection, the Poore collection, and our Rare Book collection.

As more material and other collections are being digitised to be made available on the JSTOR platform, we recommend to periodically check the site, to ascertain whether and what new resources have been added.

Our IIIF repository is a digital research-friendly environment that offers high-resolution images, image-enhancement tools, and collaborative features, to support a range of digital activities and Scholarly Primitives (e.g., deep zooming, annotation, and note-taking). On this platform, we publish trustworthy and authoritative digital surrogates of archival materials, accompanied by very comprehensive descriptive and contextual metadata. Access to the platform is publicly available.

A wide range of exhibitions curated by, or in collaboration with, the Archives and Special Collections teams are publicly available online. Some of the exhibitions critically tackle topics related to the British, Spanish and Portuguese Empires and their colonial activities, aiming to bring out the narratives and perspectives of those who were exploited and expropriated. For example:

Material from our digital collections is hosted in repositories and platforms maintained by institutions other than King’s. This is a concise list of our externally hosted collections:

Thank you - References and Credits

Ahmed, S. (2012). On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Duke University Press

Anderson, J., Burgess, A. and Ortman, L. (2022). The problem of property. Film. Available at https://localcontexts.org/films/the-problem-of-property/

Broadley, S., Baron, J., Cornejo Cásares, O. R. and Padilla, M. (2019). Change the Subject. Film. Dartmouth Library. Available online at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SroscdR7-Y

Chew, C. (2024). Inclusive description in the Glasgow School of Art Library’s published catalog. Collections: A Journal for Archives and Museum Professionals 20, no.1(2024): 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1177/15501906241232307

Chew, C. (2023). Decolonising description: addressing discriminatory language in Scottish heritage and beyond. Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies 11, no.1 (2023): 1-18. doi.org/10.57132/jiss.213

Clark, B. and Smith, C. (2022). Prioritizing the People: Developing a Method for Evaluating a Collection’s Description of Diverse Populations. Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 60(6–7), 560–582. https://doi.org/10.1080/01639374.2022.2090042

Clarke, R.I. and Schoonmaker, S. (2020). Metadata for diversity: Identification and implications of potential access points for diverse library resources. Journal of Documentation, 76(1), 173-196. https://doi.org/10.1108/JD-01-2019-0003

Glamorgan Archives (2018). A Research Guide to Sources for the Study of LGBT History. Available online at https://glamarchives.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/Queering-Glamorgan-28Aug2018.pdf

Glamorgan Archives (2024). A Research Guide to Sources for the Study of Minority Ethnic History. Available online at https://glamarchives.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/Guide-FINAL-1.pdf

Local Contexts. Projects Board. Available online at https://localcontextshub.org/projects-board/

Local Contexts. Taxonomy. Available online at https://localcontexts.org/support/taxonomy/

Makula, A., & Turner, L. (2022). Toward Engaged Scholarship: Knowledge Inclusivity and Collaborative Collection Development between Academic Libraries and Archives and Local Public Communities. College & Research Libraries, 83(2), 246. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.2.246

Public Communities. College & Research Libraries, 83(2), 246. https://doi.org/10.5860/crl.83.2.246

Odumosu, T. (2020). The Crying Child: On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons. Current Anthropology, 61(S22), S289–S302. https://doi.org/10.1086/710062

Unsworth, J. (2000). Scholarly Primitives: what methods do humanities researchers have in common, and how might our tools reflect this? Paper delivered at the symposium Humanities Computing: formal methods, experimental practice. King's College, London, May 13, 2000. http://people.brandeis.edu/~unsworth/Kings.5-00/primitives.html

Zaagsma, G. (2023). Digital History and the Politics of Digitization, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 38(2), 830–851. https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqac050