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UCL Library Services provides access to collections across a diverse range of subjects, dating from the fourth century CE to the present day, with significant holdings from the 18th century onwards.
UCL has been collecting since its foundation in 1826, and many items in our libraries represent the attitudes and ideas of their time. We also, on occasion, still acquire material required for teaching and research which may be considered harmful or offensive in line with our current collecting policy and practice which supports and reflects a fully inclusive range of voices and perspectives. Consequently, it is possible to find harmful, discriminatory, or offensive terminology on our online library and archives catalogues, including Explore and our dedicated archives catalogue.
Our collection strategies and policies give more information about what we collect and why, and what steps we are taking to address historical inequalities in UCL’s collecting.
We follow a variety of international and local cataloguing and classification standards, including descriptive metadata, subject headings, and classification schemes. Standards are often products of western, especially anglophone, efforts and often reflect a typically 19th to mid-20th century worldview. This means that, despite our efforts, historical approaches to cataloguing remain prevalent and this limits the progress that can be made. Examples of common issues are:
- A focus on Europe and North America, or specific countries depending on the origin of the standard, especially the United States and United Kingdom.
- The dominance of Christianity over other religions or organised religions over other beliefs.
- Embedded assumptions of gender roles.
- A tendency not to acknowledge a person’s sexuality.
Library collections
Cataloguing
Library cataloguing standards such as Resource Description and Access (RDA) generally record the titles and other information present on the item being catalogued without changing them, even if they contain offensive terminology. Names of people are mostly taken from established lists, especially the US Library of Congress’s Name Authority List, which can include incorrect or out of date information about preferred names and gender. It can be slow to change these headings but UCL has joined a national scheme to make changes to names on this list easier. A member of the Retrospective Cataloguing team has been trained in submitting new entries and editing existing ones.
Subject terminology is similarly based on standard lists of terms: Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) and the US National Library of Medicine’s Medical Subject Headings (MeSH). These sometimes contain outdated or offensive terms or implications. As these are centrally controlled standards, it is difficult and time consuming to change these. A documentary - Change the Subject - tells the story of a group of students at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire who undertook to confront anti-immigrant sentiment in their library catalogue, including lobbying the United States Congress. The UK premiere was hosted at UCL in February 2020. The documentary is now freely available on the Dartmouth Libraries website. UCL sometimes chooses to use local terminology instead, which was done for the terminology described in the film.
Classification
UCL uses a range of classification schemes, all of which have been in use for many years and some of which show the biases inherent in their creation, especially towards a Christian, white, western viewpoint. Some of these are local to UCL but a number are international standard schemes used by lots of institutions worldwide.
Local schemes need much more work to maintain but can be adapted more quickly. We are continually working to identify areas in our local schemes where we can make the most impact within available resources, such as The reclassification of non-western art at UCL library in 2019.
As with subject terminology, making changes to international schemes such as Library of Congress Classification (LCC) or Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) is much harder and requires international standards bodies to be persuaded to do so.
Archive collections
Archive cataloguing does not conform to the same standards as library cataloguing, which provides archivists with much more independence to adapt ways of working. However, in the past it has been common practice to use the language directly from the documents in modern catalogues, meaning our catalogues (both paper and online) contain terms and language that are now considered discriminatory or offensive. This leaves us with a challenge. To update our catalogues with the modern-language equivalent would make the description of the contents of our holdings inaccurate, misleading our users and possibly limiting their research use. It would also be a failure on our part to acknowledge the subject matter, something that we think is important. That is why, in some cases, you will see the original language directly quoted in the catalogue. Outdated terms should appear in quotation marks, and modern-language equivalent terms may be included alongside in square brackets. In such instances, or where the archive items, but not the catalogue description, contain offensive ideas and/or language, a content warning has been added to the description.
This work started with our online archive catalogue, but we intend to move on to our Digital Collections soon. We are also addressing historical practices in our older paper handlists and card indexes as we make them available via the online catalogue.
Content warnings
Throughout our resources, you may see content warnings about catalogue descriptions and the contents of specific items or collections. Due to the extent of our holdings, we cannot apply such warnings to every item that may contain offensive language or terminology, but we are working on alternate ways to address this. As discussed above, these content warnings are mainly found on our archives catalogue.
We are continuously reviewing and updating catalogue records, but if you see anything that needs addressing, please let us know: library.liberating-collections@ucl.ac.uk.