About the event

London Metropolitan Archives (LMA) is the second largest historical archive in the UK. Looking after a vast and unique collection of manuscripts, maps, photos, books and films that tell the story of London, right back to 1067.

Join archivists from LMA to hear about their experience in working towards embedding inclusive cataloguing into their professional practice.

Inspired by the work of Carissa Chew at The National Library of Scotland to decolonise the language of the heritage sector, the staff at LMA have surveyed the discriminatory or prejudiced language towards people and communities in their own catalogue and have started working on how they should tackle this as archive professionals.

The staff at LMA will share the methodology they have developed to tackle the harmful, unnecessary, or inaccurate language in their extensive catalogue and collections. They will be thinking through difficult questions such as:

Are we erasing history? Does removing harmful language limit our users? Are our catalogues harming our users?

They will share the choices they made about whether to retain or remove historic language on the catalogue, and highlight the challenges faced and the lessons learned.

Who should attend

This event will be relevant to archivists and others who are interested in or have previously undertaken similar work.

Programme

This online event will run for 1hour 30minutes and include a presentation followed by a Q&A to initiate conversations between colleagues across the industry to share their experiences of similar work.

Additional informtion

This is a safe space. The session will not be recorded. Any views expressed by the audience are not representative of any organisation or institution.

Content Warning: Please be aware that we will be viewing and discussing discriminatory and harmful language during this session.

The impact seminar will be run via Zoom and a joining link will be sent to attendees in advance.

If you have any questions about this event, please contact us at [email protected]

Image credit: London Metropolitan Archives