This April will see the opening of our next major exhibition Unfinished Business: The Fight for Women’s Rights. Anyone visiting St Pancras from this week will see the posters that have appeared around the site, and the spectacular tapestry that has gone up in the Entrance Hall (pictured).

This exciting exhibition explores how contemporary – and indeed ongoing – struggles for gender equality and liberation in the UK have their roots in the long and fascinating history of women’s activism and campaigning.

We decided to programme this exhibition following the brilliant celebrations which took place at many institutions as part of the centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act. Although that milestone legislation gave some women in the UK the right to vote (and this was subsequently extended to all women in 1928), the wider fight for women’s rights is unfinished business, and the conversation did not end – or begin – there.

Bringing together items ranging from personal diaries, letters, banners and protest fashion, to subversive literature, film, music and art, Unfinished Business will show how women and their allies have imagined and demanded a better world with passion, imagination, humour and tenacity, putting women’s voices at the heart of the exhibition.

We know that one exhibition, however ambitious, cannot possibly tell all the stories associated with this riveting history and ongoing fights, but Unfinished Business does provide a tantalising snapshot of key moments, people and movements to encourage conversations and debates about which other stories should also be told.

Through the exhibition, our associated events programme and new podcast series, we will explore how women have campaigned for a fairer world, recognising how inequality is unequally experienced depending on people’s race, gender expression and social class. We hope visitors will take the chance to contribute their own voice, share their experiences and propose the changes they would like to see.

We will be revealing more details about the exhibition and how we are bringing it together over the coming months, with input from a fantastic curatorial team, our staff networks, and the exhibition’s advisory panel. We hope you will join us on this journey and let us know your thoughts on the fight for women’s rights – its past, present and future.

Liz Jolly

Chief Librarian

 

Research undertaken by British Library staff is often reported – even celebrated – on these pages. Imagine the careful research that goes into interpreting the manuscript fragments of medieval bibliophile and bookseller John Bagford, or putting on an exhibition such as Karl and Eleanor Marx: Life in the Reading Room, or indeed in supporting our contribution to UK library infrastructure activities, such as our recent Open and Engaged Conference.

As a national library, research informs and supports almost every aspect of our work, be it curation, conservation, preservation, digital innovation, cultural programming or learning. Whether it’s a major exhibition or a new way to discover or understand a unique part of our collections, it has been enabled by staff research.

Virtually all major museums, galleries, archives and libraries are in the same position. Although research is not our primary function, we all undertake significant amounts of research often based on our collections, and it’s important we make the outputs of that research as open as possible to allow future researchers to take advantage of and build on our work.

To make our research more visible, discoverable and reusable for further research, we’re excited to announce the launch of our Shared Research Repository.

The Shared Repository, currently a beta service, brings together the openly available research outputs produced by staff and research associates of six cultural and heritage organisations: the British Library; the British Museum; MOLA (Museum of London Archaeology); National Museums Scotland; Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew; and Tate. Each partner has their own repository and is responsible for their own content, but users can also explore the combined content using the shared search from the homepage. Articles, book chapters, datasets, exhibition texts, conference presentations, blogs and many more types of our research are now discoverable and downloadable by researchers worldwide. The repository currently holds just a selection of outputs to give a flavour of our research activities, with many more to be added in the coming months.

While UK Higher Education institutions have well established repositories (which are often essential to help manage their research submissions to the Research Excellence Framework research funding process), the research produced by cultural and heritage organisations is often not as visible as we’d like it to be. And indeed should be, since much of it is undertaken with at least some public funding in our role as Independent Research Organisations.

Even within our six current Shared Repository organisations our research is varied and wide-ranging. But browsing the first items already in the repositories also reveals interesting parallels and shared research interests, as in these examples:

• On the subject of written scripts: Pictish symbols: inscribing identity beyond the fringe of empire, National Museums Scotland 2018; Roman London's first voices: writing tablets from the Bloomberg excavations, MOLA 2016; The role of the wax tablet in medieval literacy, British Library 1994. 
• On the subject of archaeological research: Discoveries from La Manche: Five Years of Early Prehistoric Research in the Channel Island of Jersey, British Museum 2015; Excavations at Birnie, Moray, 2002, National Museums Scotland 2003; Lessons from the past and the future of food, Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew 2019.
• On the subject of paint: The effects of lead and zinc white saponification on surface appearance of paint, Tate 2008; The paint surfaces in the Psalter of Henry of Blois, British Library 1981; A Raman spectroscopic analysis of pigments from Dynastic Egyptian funerary artefacts, National Museums Scotland 2004.

If all goes well we’ll be looking at how we can extend the service both in the volume of content available, and the number and range of partner organisations including beyond the cultural sector.

Do visit our beta Shared Research Repository and explore the research outputs currently deposited. We’d love to have your feedback so please get in touch with our Repository Services team if you’d like to find out more: [email protected].

Sara Gould

Repository Services Lead

There are opportunities and benefits for growth in open access and open scholarship when experience and knowledge is shared between Higher Education Institutes and cultural heritage organisations.

On Tuesday 22^nd October, The British Library celebrated Open Access Week with the event, Open and Engaged - Forging links between higher education and cultural heritage to foster open scholarship (see #OpenEngaged19). This one-day event brought together representatives from Universities, Museums, research organisations, libraries and the private sector to examine how these links can be forged.

Liz Jolly, the Library’s Chief Librarian, opened the event with the hope that the day would allow participants to gain insights into a variety of points of view, and commence a dialogue to open up the cultural heritage sector and improve the user experience for researchers across the globe.

Our first keynote was from Helen Hardy, Digital Collections Programme Manager at the Natural History Museum (pictured above). She explained the opportunities and challenges NHM face in releasing their data and the impact that digitisation is having. Helen outlined the industrial scale processes involved in creating digital images from their very varied collection of 80 million items, which range from pinned insects to dinosaur bones. Creative solutions they are using include AI for shape recognition and colour analysis in images, as well as using Lego to create custom hardware for digitisation.

Dr Mark Sweetnam, Assistant Professor in English with Digital Humanities, Trinity College Dublin.

The second keynote was a view from higher education by Dr Mark Sweetnam, Assistant Professor in English with Digital Humanities, Trinity College Dublin. Using his experience with the Cultura EU project Mark highlighted how the project developed an interface to access very different digital collections; as well as working with cultural heritage institutions who are a conduit to researchers and users based outside of academia.

Three parallel sessions presented attendees with a choice of topics to engage with in more detail.

The accessibility and inclusive access session saw Tom Scott (Wellcome Trust) and Ben Watson (University of Kent) share the ways in which they are supporting researchers of diverse backgrounds and ability, some with complex digital access needs. Both highlighted that designing with accessibility in mind improves engagement for all. Whether placing the full-text of digitised images into alt-text or appropriately marking up headings in documents, these simple interventions that support assistive technologies such as screen readers also increase visibility of content to search engines.

Art for All: In this session Dr Andrea Wallace and Professor Simon Tanner highlighted the risk that the UK is falling behind on OA in the heritage sector, specifically referring to the ‘Survey of GLAM open access policy and practice’. In response Simon announced the launch of ‘Art for All’, a community action group working to support UK cultural heritage organisations to open digital collections for unrestricted public reuse. The group takes the view that no new rights should arise in faithful reproductions of public domain works and they will advocate for an increase in public funding for digitization.

The open collections and impact session looked at the experience of two organisations who have increased the openness of their collections. Linda Spurdle (Birmingham Museums Trust) had identified that image charges are a barrier to academics use meaning that the Museums’ collection is “missing” from publications. Jason Evans (National Library of Wales), explained how their use of Wikidata is improving access to data as well as enriching it.

The concluding panel session on Plan S and open scholarship.

The day concluded with a panel session ‘How can higher education and cultural heritage institutions better work together to ensure the success of Plan S and open scholarship?’. Plan S launched in September 2018 and will require all publications from 2021 onwards that result from research funded by public grants must be published in compliant Open Access journals or platforms. Dr Kathryn Eccles (Oxford Internet Institute) advocated that to be open and engaged is to do more than saying that there is a route through digitised material. Engagement with open collections can lead to a greater range of novel and more playful outputs such as artist engagements or infographics. In response, Dr Torsten Reimer (British Library) observed that whilst higher education institutions focus on making research publications open there is not the same focus on increasing engagement, while for cultural heritage organisations the opposite is true.

Finally, JD Hill (British Museum) raised some concerns about the impact of Plan S on humanities publishing. The fundamental issue he identified was that given the small percentage of research funding that arts and humanities researchers receive, the combined costs of image rights and article processing charges are discriminatory. However, he did challenge arts and humanities researchers to grow their own open ecosystem for a more radical route to open scholarship.

Susan Miles

Scholarly Communications Specialist