12 - Cataloguing, Classification and Critical Librarianship at Cambridge University

Summary

Introduction

The Decolonise campaign at Cambridge University included an open letter from the FLY network, for women and non-binary people of colour, to the English Faculty, requesting that the Library ‘move postcolonial books out of the basement and integrate them in the library cataloguing order’ (FLY, 2017). Students were quick to recognise the importance of library systems in the preservation and organisation of knowledge, and they demanded a professional collaboration to address a transformation of the curriculum from within the library system. The student-led Cambridge Decolonise Network first began in 2015, and organised with the call for the University to ‘Decolonise Disarm Divest’ in 2018. Students organised protests and revised reading lists via Facebook groups and Google documents. The Network led to the creation of subject-focused working groups, such as Decolonise Sociology, Decolonise Law and Decolonise Anthropology. They collaborated with groups such as Black Cantabs Research Society, a ‘counter-history project’ designed to ‘place Black students in the institution's past, present, and future’, which in turn collaborated with the University Library on a ‘Black Cantabs: History Makers’ exhibition in 2018 (Cambridge University Library, 2018; Black Cantabs, n.d.). In its specific mention of library space and cataloguing, the FLY letter encouraged library staff to reflect on the flaws in the Library's cataloguing processes and to come up with a practical plan of how to learn differently.

Cambridge University Libraries

Cambridge is a collegiate university comprising 31 autonomous colleges, each with its own library, alongside more than 30 faculty and departmental libraries and numerous museums and special collections, all working with the legal deposit University Library. The federated nature of libraries in Cambridge creates obstacles as well as possibilities. Unlike universities with a single, centralised library, we are unable to instigate total and uniform updates. However, this multilayered library ‘ecosystem’ also meant that we could implement swifter changes at a local level. Several libraries were able to respond quickly: the English Library reclassified over 2,000 books under a new subject of Contemporary Global Literature in English; and the Modern Languages Library launched a programme of consultation on changes to the curriculum, reading lists and book recommendations with students and academics.