What does it mean to decolonize a library?

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Sara Custer: Hello and welcome to the Times Higher Education Podcast. I am Sara Custer. One thing we can all agree on is that decolonization is a divisive word. I’d argue that it can also be a confusing word and one whose meaning is very dependent on the context in which it’s used. For this episode of the podcast, I spoke to two London librarians who have pulled together a collection of essays exploring what it means to decolonize the library. Their collection covers the practical and the contextual with essays from contributors in Kenya, Canada, the UK and the US. In our chat, I asked them what they mean by decolonizing the library and how that happens within the context of being a student, an academic and a researcher to clear up any of the confusion that may come with a topic like this. We also acknowledge how complicated the term decolonization is and the risks involved in using it to do the work of questioning things like library spaces, contracts with academic publishers and even how archives are classified. I left a link to the book in the notes for this episode for you to check out on your own, but now let’s listen to my conversation with Regina Everitt of the University of East London and Jess Crilly, who has just retired from the University of the Arts London.

Sara Custer: So, Jess and Regina, hello. Thank you so much for joining us today. For our listeners, can you tell us a little bit about who you are and what your background is? Regina, let’s start with you.

Regina Everitt: Okay. Hi. So I’m Regina Everitt. I’m the assistant chief operating officer, service excellence, and director of library, archives and learning services at University of East London. So that’s a real mouthful. So effectively, I’m the university librarian, but sort of sitting within the chief operating officer’s portfolio, I also support them in their work. So one of the key areas that I look at is the customer experience and how we sort of join up communication across our services. So that’s the current role. Sort of my interest around the work, you know, leading to the book, for example, is, you know, I’m quite keen to develop more diverse leadership within our libraries and academic library environments, like the higher education sector. We’re not very diverse when it comes to leadership. So I’m quite keen to help to develop other team members to those leadership roles. So that’s my interest generally.

Sara Custer: Great. And we’ll get on to the book that you guys edited and the whole reason why you’re here. But first, Jess, let’s hear from you. Tell us a bit about who you are, where you work, what your background is.

Jess Crilly: Okay, thanks. I’m Jess Crilly. I’ve worked in academic libraries in a variety of different roles, most recently as associate director for content and discovery at University of the Arts London, where I was responsible for collections, including archives and discovery, which is how people use and find them. I actually retired in September 2020. But it was really in that role that I became interested in understanding more about decolonization and how it was impacting universities and what it really meant for libraries and archives.

Sara Custer: So you have edited a collection of essays called Narrative Expansions: Interpreting Decolonisation in Academic Libraries. Do you want to tell us just a little bit about why you decided to do? I think you guys have both touched on it a little bit, but tell us explicitly why you decided to pull together a collection of essays around the decolonization of the library. It’s certainly a term we’ve heard a lot about in the curriculum and in hiring processes within higher education, but in the library specifically, tell me a little bit about why you wanted to do this.

Jess Crilly: Shall I kick off? I think to bring together some of the work that libraries are engaged in, specifically under that banner of decolonization. Often they’re part of institutional working groups or they’re working on decolonizing the curriculum with students and academics. Often the work has been in response to requests from students. So the book examines the nature of that work, how decolonisation is being interpreted, as the title suggests, in that setting, and what libraries are actually doing. And we wanted to reflect a bit on the term itself because we realize that there are tensions and risks around using the word decolonization. So we had lots of discussions about whether it should be inverted commas or just decolonization. And so we also explore what specifically justifies the use of that term. What’s the theoretical background? What are the ways that colonialism impacted knowledge production? And how, in turn, has that shaped the university library?

Sara Custer: Regina, you mentioned a little bit about kind of wanting to bring in more diversity around the leadership of libraries and how we’re having these conversations. Is that part of why you got involved in this project?

Regina Everitt: Absolutely. I mean, and within my team members, they have been sort of sharing practice, which is that’s one thing I will say about libraries internationally, that we’re fantastic about sharing practice. And my team members are very keen to get out and share their practice with other institutions. And this work around decolonization actually was led from within my team members, my staff members. So I wanted to give them the space and the confidence to be able to explore that work. So they worked, you know, with Jess when she was at University of the Arts to put together this conferences to share the practice. And to me, it all, it does, it does interlink because it gives people the space to sort of reflect on our practice, reflect on our spaces and reflect on how we’re supporting our students or their students seeing themselves in their education. So to me, it’s all interlinked. So from my perspective, I looked at it from the leadership perspective of creating environments where I have team members who felt confident to go out and explore and challenge the practice within the institution. And to me, I think that all sort of rolls up to, you know, sort of developing leadership moving forward.

Sara Custer: It is quite interesting. And I agree with you. I think a lot of this stuff is interconnected. Somebody listening to this right now might be like, oh, well, this is about just library science and library information. This doesn’t really have much to do with me. But actually, it is all quite interconnected across the university. Can you tell us a little bit about perhaps what you learned in the process of editing this collection of essays and what decolonization of libraries, what role that plays within decolonization in general across institutions?

Jess Crilly: Well, we wanted to look at it from multiple perspectives in a joined-up way, as you just said. So there are case studies in UK university libraries, but also we look at the student perspective, how important it is to them and their belonging within the institution. We looked at some academics perspectives and work in related areas like academic support and research methodologies, the role of what we call LIS, library and information science education, what library school students are taught. And we also looked at different contexts of decolonisation. So that’s why the book is international in scope. So as well as looking at the UK academy, the metropole, if you like, in terms of decolonisation, it also looks at case studies from settler nations, Canada, the US and post-colonial or probably neo-colonial context of libraries in Nairobi, Kenya. So, speaking personally, I learned an enormous amount from our authors who explain the context and background and the detail of the work that they were doing. And I think that breadth of looking at the subject is hopefully a strength of the book.

Regina Everitt: Absolutely. And I think for our developing professionals within our practice, it’s good for them to, again, to get a taste of how this topic is being approached. And I think in years to come, it will be very interesting for those professionals as they develop to see how this work develops, how sustainable it is, because one of the concerns I had at the start of this project, well, first of all, I struggle with the term decolonization because having grown up in America, we just look at sort of racism and race relations generally. We just kind of call it what it is, from my perspective. But so that’s where the challenge was for me. But I think this is a real opportunity to look at it from different perspectives. So what I learned is to understand what decolonization means within the context of all of these other institutions. And the Canadian example was a real eye-opener. And I really would like to learn more about sort of, you know, sort of Indigenous response in this space.

Sara Custer: Talking about the term decolonization, and just this is something that you mentioned earlier about kind of the tension around using the term decolonization. Can we just unpack that a little bit and let’s talk a little bit about what that tension is and how that perhaps plays out in the context of libraries?

Jess Crilly: Okay, well, I think going into it, we were very aware that there are risks in terms of using the term decolonization. And one of the risks is just simply overclaiming. I mean, diversifying your collections isn’t decolonizing. So there’s a risk of overclaiming and not being specific about what you’re doing. There’s a risk of contributing to the overuse of the word so that it loses any sense of its original radical intentions and just becomes a buzzword and something that everybody’s doing. And there’s also the risk that what you do gets kind of co-opted into tokenistic responses, but it doesn’t actually sort of fundamentally change anything. So I think we were very aware of those risks. And that’s why we wanted to explore the theoretical background a bit in order to say this is why we’re talking, this is the impact of decolonization, of colonization rather, on knowledge production. This is how it’s impacted libraries. This is what we’re trying to do about that. So we wanted to kind of trace that line through so that there was a proper underpinning of being able to use that word.

Regina Everitt: And Sara, this is where you hear, I think, the strengths of Jess and myself working together, because again, I think she works very well with this sort of theoretical sort of context, which I think is very, very important. And then for me, and maybe, you know, for me, it’s just down to the practicalities is who’s telling this story. You know, we are, you know, sort of enablers to access to information. Are we being clear about where the narrative is coming from? Who’s telling the story? Helping our users to triangulate information. Okay, so our collections speak from one specific perspective, but to get another perspective, we may signpost people to other perspectives. It’s about being honest about the voices within our collections, the voices that are silent within our collections and signposting and encouraging our users to continue to ask those questions about why is this so? Who says that this is the, you know, that this is the correct approach? Where does this knowledge come from? I think that’s our role as librarians. And I really look forward, you know, again, in years to come to see how this practice develops. And as I said, it is interlinked. It’s all well and good to say you’ve got diverse collections, a great reading list, but what does your leadership look like? What are your spaces look like? How do your students feel when they’re using your collections? So that’s how it’s all interlinked from our perspective.

Sara Custer: That’s a really good point. Just, I mean, because libraries are often behemoths of structures on university campus, at least pre-pandemic days, they’re the real beating heart of a campus. And if those spaces are inaccessible by certain sectors of society or the campus community, then what does that say about accessibility to that knowledge? That’s a really good point. I’m interested to know, you guys were pulling together this collection at quite an interesting time, not just the global pandemic, but also after the murder of George Floyd, the end of Donald Trump’s administration. There were lots of hot issue discussions going on during the time that you were pulling together this collection. How did that influence the way you were looking at these essays?

Jess Crilly: I think it had an enormous influence. I think it was, it’s funny to look back on it now because it was such a tumultuous year for all of us, kind of professionally, privately. It was really a tumultuous year. It was a year with all of those things going on that you’ve just mentioned, but also the, you know, universities closed, libraries didn’t close. In fact, it’s not fair to say universities closed either. Their physical campuses closed, but not the sort of digital online presence and support. So it was a really kind of momentous year. And I think the murder of George Floyd really escalated anti-racism and institutional responses and kind of public commitments to anti-racism. And that often included what universities or other institutions were going to do about their libraries and their collections. And that happened right across the kind of museums, libraries, cultural sector. And sometimes there was pushback against those statements because they obviously didn’t tie up with what was actually what it actually was like to work or study in those environments. But it was also the year that The Brutish Museums was published about restitution of the Benin Bronzes. It was the year that the statue of Edward Colston was toppled. It was the year that institutions like the National Trust produced a report about the impact of slavery and colonialism on their collections. So, altogether, it just kind of added up, I think, to what felt like a kind of a struggle over the narrative of history. And I think that the decolonizing movement was a part of that sometimes quite public and contentious struggle for history. And as Regina says, whose knowledge, whose knowledge counts, whose narrative counts, whose voice counts. So, yeah, and I think it’s kind of continuing in some ways because since we started editing the book, there’s been quite a pushback on critical race theory, which several of our authors have used in their chapters. So, I think, in a way, it’s kind of not over. Some of it is over, but some of the kind of events are just kind of mutating into other kinds of events.

Regina Everitt: I think the book would have happened because we know that even pre-pandemic, there have been a lot of discussions around, you know, how do we, you know, sort of decipher this? What does this mean within our sort of collections and within our practice? But I mean, the pandemic where you had people at home and people, I think it was almost like a pressure cooker. You know, people were at home, they were frustrated, they had more time to focus on sort of these issues. So, again, you know, with the protests, I mean, there was just time for people to really sit and reflect. And that’s why I, you know, I think it’s so important that this work has, I’m excited that this work was produced during that time because it was such a tumultuous time. And I would like us, again, you know, years hence to go back and reflect on, you know, the language we use, you know, whether or not this same passion still exists, whether again, and I keep talking about how sustainable it is because that has all that was one of my concerns about this, you know, sort of the decolonization agenda, that it did feel like a fad. We’ll see. We’ll see. But are we going to actually put our money where our mouth is? So we can go back to this book and we can reflect on it and maybe even go back to the authors in the book and see what’s shifted within their institutions. I think it would be very exciting to see that.

Sara Custer: I guess the other side of that is also how the conversation about decolonization gets caught up in the culture wars of kind of broader society. And I’m wondering if you guys think there’s a risk of that happening or if that’s a conversation that kind of exists outside of the walls of academia and is something that kind of perhaps politicians and media talking heads worry themselves over when, in actuality, librarians and academics know exactly what we mean when we’re talking about kind of questioning the fount of knowledge and questioning why we present information in a certain way and making spaces as accessible as possible. Is there a risk that these conversations will get caught up in all of that? And will that perhaps affect the sustainability of something like this?

Jess Crilly: I think they already are getting caught up in it. I think many national institutions, I mean, I mentioned the National Trust, but many institutions who are not used to being on the front page of newspapers are finding themselves in that position. I think many I’ve seen libraries in that position. So I think we are already getting caught up in what you might call culture wars. I don’t know. What Regina thinks?

Regina Everitt: Yeah, I mean, just the concept of culture wars, I think, is an interesting one. Basically, you know, people are just challenging, you know, existing knowledge and thinking and asking different questions and just requesting that things be looked at through a different prism, different perspectives. And it’s up to individuals, once they’ve triangulated that information, what they do with that. I think it’s quite interesting that because people are being challenged in this way, knowledge is being challenged, perspectives are being challenged, that it’s almost like people think it’s a bad thing. But that’s how, isn’t that how civilizations evolve? That we challenge, we question, we learn, we get, you know, we research. So I think it should be more of a positive and exciting thing. It should be what we do, certainly within universities. And I mean, this comes up quite a lot, you know, again, with my sort of remit, you know, thinking about customer experience within within my institution. You know, is it always about, you know, the students being satisfied because they’re happy and they, you know, walked away, you know, happy with the outcome of the class? Or should you feel a bit uncomfortable in universities that people are challenging your thinking and you go away and think, okay, you know, I’m not sure I agree with that, but I’m going to go away and think about it. You know, I think this is how it must be, you know, that we should be asking these questions. We should be challenged. And in everything that’s written in this book, you know, again, future professionals should look back at this and say, actually, you know, that didn’t stick. That wasn’t relevant. We have moved on. This is the approach we’re taking now. That’s at least my hope.

Jess Crilly: I think also there are some mischaracterizations of, for example, decolonizing reading lists or building more diverse collections. So, for example, I think the word Eurocentric, I think we’re trying to move away from Eurocentricity, but not move away from the European knowledge. So, I think sometimes things are mischaracterized. I think what libraries are aiming at is a plurality of knowledges, not to dismiss one knowledge or the existing foundations of knowledge that we have, but just to fill gaps in that story and introduce other forms of knowledge. So, I think sometimes it’s that kind of mischaracterization that kind of causes pushback.

Regina Everitt: I think so. I mean, it wasn’t it the director general for the National Trust who used the term retain and explain. So, it’s sort of retain, it’s not about sort of chucking things away, but sort of, you know, telling the wider story about a thing, a place, how we got there. Or once someone’s done research and they’ve uncovered maybe diaries of people who lived at a certain time, telling their story. I’m not sure what’s wrong with that.

Sara Custer: And context is really important. And we’ve mentioned that some of your authors of the essays are from kind of post-colonial instances or settler contexts. Without giving too much away, because we do want people to go and explore this on their own, what are some of the main takeaways in terms of the geographical perspectives for you from your essays?

Jess Crilly: Well, to mention the Canadian case study, and a lot of work has been going on in Canadian university libraries in relation to this. I think, as Regina said, it was extremely thought-provoking and interesting. And librarians there and the universities are working in the context of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of 2015, which is something particular to that environment. And that acknowledged the role of education in the suppression of Indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing and being. So, those librarians within their institutions are working to address the recommendations of that commission. And because it’s a settler context, the dialogue is less about decolonization and more about reconciliation. And their roles are to do with indigenization. So it’s a slightly different context, but it’s extremely interesting to learn about what they’re doing. Yeah, how they support Indigenous students thinking about reintroducing elements of Indigenous knowledge into the curriculum, ways of researching, and so on. So, yes, it’s a whole slightly different agenda to the one that we have here.

Regina Everitt: And the same is true with the US, because in the US, the term decolonization isn’t normally used, is it? It’s about, you know, sort of social justice, racial justice in the US. And of course, you know, people will be aware of the Knowledge Justice book that was produced a year or so ago by academic librarians in the US. So that in and of itself is a very different context. And that author talks about a very specific time. And again, all of the things that you described earlier, Sara, about what was happening in the United States and how she’s helping her students to navigate that information and to think critically about how one assesses information there. So I think that’s a very, very interesting perspective. And that is one, again, that over time it will be interesting to look back. I mean, in 2024, it’s very possible that, you know, we may see a resurgence of Trumpism, you know, who knows? So, it’d be very interesting to see, you know, how that um evolves in the US. So, yeah, some really interesting perspectives there. Um, sorry, Jess, do you have something else?

Jess Crilly: I was also just going to mention we had um authors writing from Nairobi in Kenya, which again was a kind of massive learning point for me, and it was extremely informative. So, that’s a post-colonial or possibly neo-colonial would be a better description. And they write about the challenges of decolonizing libraries, and they share a study of the McMillan Library, which is a public library in Nairobi, which was white only until independence. And then it’s now managed by an organization called the Book Bunk Trust to create contemporary libraries for Nairobi. They have different agendas but face some very similar problems. But they’re concerned with as they decolonize, what do they remember and what do they forget? What do they do with the literature of the past of that colonial period? How do they not, as they describe it, move on and forget?

Regina Everitt: Yeah, sort of forget and move on, yeah.

Jess Crilly: Yeah, how do they maintain, especially the voices of the radical past? How do they maintain that? How do they not just turn a new leaf and start again? And they also talk about the impact of structural adjustment programs on their sort of education and library infrastructure, and then the difficulty of creating their own digital collections and how Google Arts and Culture has stepped in to do that, which on one level is great, but they question the impact of economic restraint on being able to develop and manage their own.

Regina Everitt: That’s right. Yeah, who curates that information. Yeah, very interesting perspectives in that chapter.

Sara Custer: Fascinating. Regina, you’d mentioned that you guys kind of are coming at this from a different perspective. Jess is a bit more theoretical, where you’re very much more of like a practical application of this conversation. I’d like to give our readers just a few ideas of after having listened to this conversation about how they might go and start implementing some decolonization of the libraries on their own campuses.

Regina Everitt: Well, I mean, one of I think a very practical chapter is done by Briony Birdi, who’s a senior lecturer in information sciences at Sheffield. And she, you know, I would say it’s an excellent primer. It starts with having the conversations and considering the impacts and then thinking about, you know, how you start to dismantle that. And so she’s got some really practical sort of recommendations there. She’s got some recommendations for some readings and some approaches that she’s taken. So I think, so the easy thing is just, you know, start to have the conversation, you know, getting people to do some reading and to understand the impact, having conversations with the students, because at the end of the day, our core business, this is about supporting our students to success, having this, you know, conversations with them, understanding what their experiences are, and then also having the conversations with the academic staff who will see challenges on how they deliver on this agenda. So yeah, I recommend that that chapter as a useful primer of where to start.

Sara Custer: Just based on the student perspective, Regina, because you’ve mentioned them a couple of times. What has been the students’ response and your experience to efforts to decolonize the library? I mean, do they get involved? Do they understand?

Regina Everitt: Absolutely, which is why we opened the book with a chapter by Hillary Gyebi-Ababio, who from the National Union of Students, who sort of talks about how the students were the key impetus for pushing forward on this agenda. So very much sort of engaged. And from our own students, again, they are very vocal about what sort of resources they need. So they’re vocal from that perspective about what sort of resources they’d like to see, what sort of access they’d like to see. We have conversations about having role models, and we do work with students on how we can, you know, sort of connect our academic and professional services staff with the students so they can sort of see what they could be, as it were. So students are definitely engaged and often the key ones sort of leading in this agenda. I think. I mean, Jess, that’s certainly the case as well for you.

Jess Crilly: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah, I would also say, I mean, the book covers, in terms of case studies, it covers some of the areas where libraries do seem to be putting quite a bit of their attention. A lot of that is around supporting academic staff with reading lists. It’s around analysing collections, often using sort of data techniques now. It’s around looking at collection development policies. What do we collect in what language, etc., and sharing those. You know, take it to your learning and teaching committee, discuss it. At LSE, they did an equality impact assessment on their collection development policy, which I thought was a very interesting approach. And as I said, trying to build this plurality of knowledge. Metadata, classification, and library subject headings, which have become out of date. And this is a kind of constant process that libraries are engaged in. But that’s one of the biggest areas where decolonization in libraries seems to be focusing. And again, there’s kind of case studies around that. But I would also say that if people wanted to get involved, as Regina said, I think if you’re going to use that term decolonization, you do need to kind of look at history. You do have to try to understand a bit about that. But as well as kind of published books like this, there’s lots of really, really good open information that’s out there. And I think introducing more of that open information into libraries is another thing that libraries are doing and should do. And I really noticed that now that I’ve retired, I’m outside of academia. I can’t just, you know, pick up a journal article.

Sara Custer: And academic publishing is something you guys touch on as well in the collection, just in terms of which journals libraries are subscribed to and which they aren’t, and if some of the smaller journals get even any sort of face time with academic communities.

Regina Everitt: Absolutely. I mean, that’s the challenge of the big deals, which is what, you know, I think spoken about in the LSE chapter in particular, when we do need to reflect on what gets bundled in there and what gets left out. So that’s another key area that we need to reflect. But there’s so many areas that need to be touched on. But again, that’s the other thing that I would like people to take away from this collection is that you will notice that institutions have chosen their battles. You’re not going to be able to do everything because the minute you take that approach of, you know, let’s try to do everything and make sure that it works perfectly before we launch it, then you’ll never do anything. It just leads to inertia. So I think what people may need to do when they’re having those conversations and going back to Briony’s chapter about, you know, start with having the conversations and then deciding what is that key area that your institution wants to focus on and start there. You know, don’t try to do everything because there are loads of things that need to be looked at. Like, don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good.

Jess Crilly: Absolutely. Exactly. And I would also agree with that. I think you need to connect and collaborate with other people in the institution. For example, when I was at UAL, there was the Decolonising Arts Institute. There’s always a teaching and learning group who are very invested in this work with course leaders, work with the student union. So I think it’s really a question of kind of, you know, joining up with those other people who are invested in the same or similar agendas and seeing what can be done. And a lot of libraries are sharing their practice, putting out online guides, sharing their practice, pointing to open resources. And yeah, as Regina said earlier, libraries are very good at sharing their practice. So there is a lot that is very, you know, easily findable. But it is about the specificity of your own organization, your own library. Yeah, there isn’t a kind of toolkit approach. And we were very careful in the book that this isn’t a toolkit. It’s not a how-to. It’s some sharing of experience.

Regina Everitt: Just sharing practice, yeah. And I think the other key thing as well. So it needs to come sort of from the bottom up sideways and the top as well, because obviously having that sort of grassroots approach is good, but you do need to have leaders who hold the purse strings to be able to, you know, sort of put some budget aside to allow you to be able to progress that work. So, that is one of the key things that I tend to focus on with some of the work that I do with the professional societies, such as SCONUL, where we try to focus on getting leaders to really buy into this because we do need the leaders to help to support this agenda.

Sara Custer: And sorry, what is SCONUL, Regina?

Regina Everitt: Oh, so the Society of College, University and National Libraries. And I probably said it in the wrong order, but that’s what it is.

Sara Custer: Okay, people can find it if they want to know more.

Sara Custer: Jess and Regina, thank you so much for that fascinating conversation about this collection of essays. It sounds like it’s very broad in its experiences that it’s sharing with people and definitely a good starting point for the work. And I agree with you, Regina. It’s going to be fascinating to see how this conversation develops into the future.

Regina Everitt: Absolutely. Thank you.

Jess Crilly: Thank you, Sara.

Sara Custer: That’s it for today. Thanks again to Jess and Regina for joining us for this episode and thank you for listening. If you have any comments or suggestions or questions about the podcast, do get in touch. It is sara.custer@timeshighereducation.com. We’ll see you next time.

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