Dr. Polly Russell, Lead Curator for Human Geography and Anthropology, writes about her experience of being immersed in a collaborative, feminist, oral history project. She reflects on the difficult process of selecting interviewees and describes the the vibrancy and depth of the resulting interviews.

www.bl.uk/sisterhood

On Friday 8^th March, International Women’s Day, the British Library held an event with 150 guests to celebrate the launch of a new oral history archive and website. This marked the end of a three year research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, called ‘Sisterhood & After: the Women’s Liberation Oral History Project.’ This project has collected oral histories with Women’s Liberation campaigners to create an archive that captures women’s fights for equal rights and liberation in the UK from 1968-1990 through a series of in-depth interviews with 60 feminist activists and intellectuals.

Speakers for the launch event included two of the project’s interviewees, Sally Alexander, feminist activist and historian, and Susie Orbach, co-founder of the Women’s Therapy Centre and author of Fat is a Feminist Issue. Sally spoke beautifully of the value of the archive for future historians – she noted how oral history takes seriously emotion, subjectivity and memory as important analytical categories for the historian and researcher. Susie, a veteran campaigner, talked of how the archive would inform new generations of activists and she also reflected, as a psychotherapist, on the process of being interviewed for an oral history

Equal Pay for Equal Work Badge. Image courtesy of the Women's Library.

For the last three years much of my work as a curator at the British Library in the Social Science team has been dominated by this project. Working with Dr Margaretta Jolly and Research Associate Dr Rachel Cohen at the University of Sussex, we have attempted to create a permanent record of the voices and stories of women who were part of the WLM. This has been a wonderful but challenging task. On a practical level we have struggled with the problem of trying to represent a movement involving thousands of women with just 60 oral history interviews. Working closely with an Advisory Board we wrangled over a long-list of more than 400 names and whittled this down, through debate and discussion, to 60.

We wanted to make sure that we captured the accounts of women from across Britain and from a range of different backgrounds, as well as those women whose contribution to the intellectual project of feminism is well known. Interviewees included, for instance, Una Kroll, one-time surgeon and campaigner for women’s rights to be priests; Betty Cook, founder member of Barnsley Miners’ Wives Action Group; Karen McMinn, Co-Ordinator for Women’s Aid Northern Ireland and; Rowena Arshad, member of the first black women’s group in Scotland and Equal Opportunities Commissioner for Scotland 2001-2007. We have worked hard to try and counter simplistic representations of ‘feminists’ and the little that is known about the women who chose the term for themselves during this period. These oral histories, available in full via the British Library or in edited clips on the website, last, on average, seven hours each and are fully transcribed and summarised. Taken individually they are deep biographies accounting for the circumstances and consequences of an individual’s activism. Taken as a whole they bring to life a period of exceptional political vibrancy in which ideas about work, relationships, family and children, the political process, the state, sexuality, culture and identity were freshly explored through the lenses of feminism and social justice.

If interviewee selection has been one focus of our energies, another has been trying to tell the story of the WLM on a website aimed at ‘A’ level and university students. Arguments about feminism, gender and the WLM are contested, subtle and complex but by necessity our website had to be accessible, engaging and informative to a non-specialist audience. In the end we have let our interviewee's voices lead the site with more than 120 oral history extracts and short documentary films used to prompt analysis, discussion and debate.

If this lady was a car... Image courtesy of © Jill Posener

For me, ‘Sisterhood & After’ is about creating permanent record of the voices and stories of women who were part of the WLM and to provide an account of the movement in all its complexity, contradictions and colour. But I also hope it will create a space of encounters where everyone can be inspired to identify with the political project of feminism and with the experience and challenge of activism in general. The launch event on Friday was not the end of something but the start – we hope that over time the oral history collection will grow in size and scope.

Useful links

There is a long list of useful links on the Sisterhood and After Learning website at the British Library.

In this blog post, Abiola Olanipekun, a British Library Intern, offers a personal reflection on an article about the management of members of 'Generation Y' at work (by Katie Best and Francis Braithwaite). The original article is available through the Management and Business Studies Portal and is linked to below.

As a member of the so called 'Generation Y', I have grown up with digital appliances all around me. Generation Y are the first generation to have had regular computer use at school, but the last to play outside in a way that the 'Generation X' kids did (the generation before us, generally considered to be those born from the early 60s to late 70s). Without it being a massive deal to us, we grew up with progressive technology, from the early game consoles, Microsoft packages, VHS to DVD, MP3s…you name it; we were the guinea pigs for it and consumers of it.

Then, in recent years, the digital world upped an ante or two. MySpace was given to us, Facebook was everywhere, and Twitter exploded on us. Well, as they say, the rest is history…at least until a new gadget or excitable craze comes out.

Well, before I completely lose my audience, I came across an interesting article that was one of the written pieces waiting to be uploaded to the Management and Business Studies Portal at the British Library. I read through it and had a semi-deep think about it, and here a some of my honest opinions about the way Generation Y are construed and described, and about the advice on managing this group that is offered…

From what Katie Braithwaite and Francis Braithwaite describe, Generation Y is not exactly loved by all, particularly not by some of their Baby Boomer and Generation X colleagues and managers. They suggest that the multi-generational workplace brings new issues also into play and that there are considerable downsides and consequences to badly managing Generation Y, and to losing sight of the benefits that their interests can have to the workplace. Their interests should be acknowledged, or better still, engaged with.

Social media

The article also highlights the differences in the social networks of Generation Y and Generation X which are connected to the elephant in the room, otherwise known as: social media. Best and Braithwaite also discuss how the modern workplace can (and perhaps should) facilitate Generation Y’s adeptness with social media.

Well, here are my humble thoughts about Generation Y at work. As a member of Generation Y, I think it is safe to say that one management style will not fit all. Different people within a generation will produce different outputs and work in different ways. Without suggesting that Best and Braithwaite are over-generalising, I do feel managers (on a whole) can be given credit for accepting and working with the differences between them and different members of Generation Y. A growing number of organisations do recognise that Generation Y’s social media use is invaluable and they are making steps to accommodate this. However, as social media is still evolving and progressing at such a rate, who knows how Generation Y and their managers will end up in working with this change.

Feel free to disagree with me, or better yet, read the article and consider the issues yourself. This has been my brief take on this intriguing article and, for now, I will continue to read through the many articles I work with to see whether another thought-provoking piece about Generation Y will pop up!

Abiola Olanipekun is an Intern in the Social Sciences department, working with the Business collections and the Management and Business Studies Portal. All views expressed are her own. You can follow Abiola on Twitter @Ola_Ola1

 References

(2011) Best, Katie. & Braithwaite. Francis. Generation Y Not? Chartered Management Institute.

Other useful links

Researchers of Tomorrow: the research behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students http://explorationforchange.net/index.php/rot-home.html

Generation X: The slackers who changed the world http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/generation-x-the-slackers-who-changed-the-world-436651.html

The CMI Management Articles of the Year competition has just been launched. Read on to find out more...

The British Library works in partnership with CMI on the Management Book of the Year award which were held at the Library at the end of January. Every year there is also a competition for Management Articles of the Year and the call for this years competition has just been launched.

The competition showcases the best research articles written for a practitioner audience. Working in collaboration with the British Academy of Management and the Association of Business Schools, this innovative initiative is sponsored by John Wiley and Sons Ltd.

The winners will be recognised at an Awards Evening at the British Library in January 2014, published by the CMI in a special collation of winning articles and featured in Professional Manager magazine (readership 138,000). Academics affiliated to a university in the UK are invited to enter and the deadline for submissions is 17 May 2013.

To find out more about how you can enter go to www.managers.org.uk/toparticles or email [email protected]

If you are a researcher in Management and Business studies you might be interested in our portal which provides free research reports, summaries and briefing papers.

Jonnie Robinson and Holly Gilbert write about the British Library's VoiceBank - a collection of 15,000 recordings made by the public during the Evolving English exhibition. It includes voices from around the world with wonderful examples of everyday speech, accent and dialect. Read more below...

The Herculean task of cataloguing the British Library VoiceBank is now underway. The VoiceBank is a collection of sound recordings made by visitors to the Evolving English exhibition which took place at the British Library between November 2010 and April 2011. The exhibition looked at the history and diversity of the English language in all its forms so it was a good place to collect some new information about contemporary variation in spoken English. For this purpose, tucked just inside the entrance were three specially constructed booths containing a telephone and a set of instructions. On lifting the phone receiver, contributors heard prompts that asked them to provide anonymised information about themselves including gender, year of birth, whether they spoke any languages at home other than English and where they thought their accent was from. They were then give the option of talking about a word or phrase that they found interesting or amusing or of reading the popular children’s story ‘Mr Tickle’, or both. Jonnie Robinson, Lead Curator of Sociolinguistics and Education at the British Library and curator of the Evolving English exhibition, describes the reasons for using the Mr Tickle text in a previous blog post and on Radio 4’s Today programme. Around 15,000 people contributed to this incredible collection and we are now in the process of uncovering the exciting diversity and rich research potential of the recordings. You may even have made a recording yourself.

After listening to a mere 1,920 of the VoiceBank recordings, the variety in terms of age and geography is already astounding. The oldest participants were born in 1928 and include a German refugee who explains how her family used the word ‘emigranto’ to describe the mixture of languages used at first by immigrants which combined German syntax with English words such as in the term ‘geboiltes egg’ as well as a man from Tyneside who uses the word ‘dunch’ to mean ‘collision’. The youngest contributor is a boy from Chicago born in 2003 who simply says ‘bagel’. The contributors have accents that come from across the world including of course a huge number of locations in the UK and Ireland, as well as many other European countries from Portugal and the Channel Islands to Serbia and Estonia. There are voices from African countries including South Africa, Zimbabwe and Nigeria and contributions from Russia, Australia and New Zealand as well as many parts of Asia and the Middle East including India, Japan, Israel and Iran. South America is represented by voices from Brazil, Colombia and Venezuela and there are contributions from several US states, Canada and the Caribbean. So far no voice from Antarctica but you never know, according to Wikipedia the first child was born in the South Pole in 1913.

We’ll be writing more about some of the fascinating words and phrases discussed by the participants in the coming weeks. The first batch of 1,731 VoiceBank recordings has now been uploaded to the Sound and Moving Image catalogue and is available in the British Library Reading Rooms. Right now I’m researching the word ‘shuntler’, used by one contributor’s mum in Chesterfield, Derbyshire in the north of England but thought to be a made-up word by his dad. A Sheffield dialect dictionary published in 1891 may contain just the information I need…

The Library's Encounters Between Art and Science exhibition promises to be a fascinating investigation of the complex relationship between these two domains. In this post Toby Austin-Locke, inspired by the context of this exhibition, reflects on what he considers to be a fundamental and inextricable relationship between artistic and scientific practices.

Science and art may appear as incommensurable, as the common narrative goes: science deals with facts, art opinion; science is about objectivity, art is about subjectivity; science is based on empiricism, art on aesthetics. But science and art need not be so divergent, there are many times when artistic and scientific practices cross paths. I’m not only thinking of creative understandings of science such as the literary explorations of physics made by J.G. Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition (1970); or Proust’s famous investigations of memory (1996) that blur the lines between literature, neuroscience and psycho-analysis. Nor am I only thinking of times when the role of the scientist and the role of the artist converge in one institution or person, Leonardo Da Vinci being the exemplar of such convergences which can be more widely demonstrated by the British Library’s Database of Italian Academies project.

   

The Leonardo Notebook - Page 22  Copyright © The British Library Board. Sound and light ff. 174v-175. Leonardo made extensive observations and experiments on the production of sound. The wind instruments and drums each has a different mechanism for varying the pitch.

There is a more fundamental convergence between scientific and artistic practices. As Bourdieu puts it in The Rules of Art, “each field (religious, artisitic, scientific, economic, etc.), through the particular form of regulation of practices and the representations that it imposes, offers to agents a legitimate form of realising their desires” (1996: 228). Both science and art show means of understanding the world in which we find ourselves, in Weberian language they offer systems of rationalisation that constitute, form and represent worldviews. Science and art both offer methods of bridging the existential gap between ourselves and the external world; or in the words of the notoriously trendy and esoteric Deleuze and Guattari, art and science “cast planes over the chaos” (2003: 202). A Wittgensteinian understanding too seems to point towards both science and art just as one means of understanding the world, for if we accept his proposition that to know the limits of thought we would have to be able to think both sides of that limit and as such go beyond what was thinkable, we have to conclude that “the subject does not belong to the world but it is a limit of the world” (1922: 5.632). In short, science is as bound by the limits of subjectivity, of the world, as is art. This does not equate to entirely dismissing that perhaps science has a greater claim to objectivity than art, but instead, quite simply, does not ignore the role of subjectivity in objectivity, in the practice of science.

I’m sure there are some of you out there, who have more rigorous and scientific minds than myself, who are despairing right now – yet another anthropological and philosophical pontificator missing the point that science is factual, it represents reality whereas art mystifies it, acts as fetish. The view of the work of art as fetish may appear to separate it entirely from the cold, factual gaze of scientific observation. But we only need to follow the etymologies of the words fact and fetish to their common Latin root of factitius, meaning artificially created or made, to see that they are not all that foreign to one another. This is something that Bruno Latour, following from Bachelard, has demonstrated exceptionally well - that we need not pick between constructivism and realism (2010; 1988).  Latour points out that Pasteur “asserts in one and the same breath that the ferment of his lactic acid is real because he carefully set the stage on which the ferment revealed itself on its own” (2010: 17). The scientist must carefully organise all the element of their laboratory in order to produce the real fact that results of experimentation.

 

Pasteur in his lab from Musee D’Orsay    Albert Edelfelt, via Wikimedia Commons from Wikimedia Commons

From such a standpoint the artist and scientist are united by at least one characteristic: creation. Both engage in creative activity, bringing the Jungian archetype of the artist-scientist into clear view. The Dialectic of the Enlightenment (Adorno & Horkhiemer 1999) is certainly not behind us, but more and more, through the discourse of the likes of Latour, and the popularisation of post-modernist and post-structural thought, is the understanding of the role of science not as that of discovery but that of creation becoming more and more prominent. Such an understanding of science, as not entirely separate from creative-artistic practice, perhaps brings the reuniting of the artistic spirit, the religious spirit and the scientific spirit called for by theoretical physicist David Bohm (1998) closer to fruition. But, before the legacy of the Enlightenment can truly be left behind, there are certainly plenty of Dawkins-esque dogmatists, who would deny such convergences, to be convinced. Perhaps the Encounters between art and Science exhibition now at the British Library can help in starting to show how art and science are not, and never have been, in total opposition to one another.  

Bibliography

-       Adorno, Theador & Horkhiemer, Max (1999) The Dialectic of the Enlightenment, London: Verso. British Library Shelf Mark: X.529/37191

-       Ballard, J.G. (1970) The Atrocity Exhibition, London: Flamingo. British Library Shelf Mark: YA.1997.b.3784

-       Bohm, David (1998) ‘On the relationships of science and art’ in On Creativity, Lee Nichol (eds), pp. 27-40, London: Routledge. British Library Shelf Mark: YK.2006.a.12583

-       Bourdieu, Pierre (1996) The Rules of Art, Cambridge: Polity Press. British Library Shelf Mark: YC.1996.b.5503

-       Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix (2003) What is Philosophy?, London and New York: Verso. British Library Shelf Mark: YC.1995.b.6266

-       Latour, Bruno (1988) The Pasteurization of France, London: Harvard University Press. British Library Shelf Mark: YK.1989.b.2449

-       Latour, Bruno (2010) On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, Durham: Duke University Press. British Library Shelf Mark: m11/.11912

-       Proust, Marcel (1996) In Search of Lost Time: Volume One: Sawnn’s Way, London: Vintage. British Library Shelf Mark: H.2001/1040

-       Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1922) Tractatus logico-philosophicus, Routlegde and Kegan Paul. British Library Shelf Mark: X5/9907

Toby Austin Locke is currently working in the British Library social sciences team on the Social Welfare Portal and is due to start working towards his doctorate in October 2013 at Goldsmiths College, University of London. You can contact him on twitter @tobyalocke or read more of his blog-posts at www.plurality-press.info 

Last week I attended a couple of the curator sessions which formed part of our social science doctoral training day. One of the sessions was by Dr Luke McKernan, our Moving Image Curator. The collections he looks after, and services he has developed, offer incredible potential to researchers across the social sciences and I wanted to briefly highlight some of them here.

Many people may not realise that the British Library holds moving image material, but in fact there are over 55,000 items in our collections, including ethnographic videos, documentaries and 14,000 music videos. These resources are available to access via our listening and viewing service and can be found through our main catalogue.

 

Dr Luke McKernan speaks about the new Broadcast News service

There is a new service which could add significant value to social science research, particularly that which undertakes discourse analysis on news sources as part of its methodology. The British Library Broadcast News service provides access to television and radio news programmes from seventeen channels which have been broadcast in the UK since May 2010. Forty-six hours are recorded per day and they are almost immediately available to watch in our reading rooms. Many of the programmes recorded come with subtitles, which we have been able to use to provide a word-search function. This will allow you to find news programmes relevant to your research as well as particular moments within those programmes which will be of interest to you.

The channels we record include: BBC, ITV, Channel 4, Sky News, Al-Jazeera English, NHK World, CNN, France 24, Bloomberg, Russia Today and China's CCTV News.

Luke McKernan has more relevant information about this service, and other moving image services on his blog. He is currently investigating speech-to-text technology and how this will enable us to make even more moving image and sound collection fully searchable. You can read more about this process here.

Other resources

Tom Hulme, our ESRC intern, has written a case study about using Broadcast News at the British Library. Read it here.

Eleanor Bird, one of the British Library's collaborative doctoral students, describes her experience of meeting other BL PhD students and writes of the different ways they make use of BL collections in their research.

On Thursday 10th January the British Library (BL) hosted a day for its collaborative doctoral (CD) students and BL staff working across different areas. This was held in the conference centre and was organised by Liz Lewis (Engagement Manager for Arts and Humanities at the BL).

Having just started my PhD in Narratives of Slavery in Canada at the University of Sheffield (supervised at the British Library by Dr Philip Hatfield), I thoroughly enjoyed the chance to meet up with fellow BL CD students - past and present - to hear more about the projects they have been involved in, and about how they have used the BL collections in their work.

A particular highlight for me was the student presentation session in which we each gave a short three-minute talk introducing our work. It was really interesting to see how the students are working with collections in diverse ways. For example, Ami Pass (University of Lincoln) is utilising her strong background in science to evaluate techniques for preserving BL material. Meanwhile, Lauren Blake (University of Sheffield) is conducting oral history interviews on food activism and William Frost (University of Sheffield) is investigating English-speaking tourists’ experience in Norway, drawing from the Library's rich travel narrative collection.

It was an exciting and vibrant atmosphere which generated some very good feedback from staff and students alike. This was the first time we had met as a group and we hope this will be the first of many more.

Useful links

Find out more about our Americas collections here.

Read Phil Hatfield's personal blog here.

Find out more about how we work with Higher Education here.

 

Gill Ridgley writes about developing and managing a British Library website and resource which examine the 2012 Games from a social science perspective.

This time last year doesn’t seem so long ago, and yet a lot happened in those 12 months - a truism, but particularly ‘true’ for the two curators working on the Social Science Department’s Sport and Society website: Gill Ridgley and Simone Bacchini.

Work started on this site in 2008 when a London 2012-related Departmental project was first mooted. The Olympics and Paralympics looked set to provide an ideal opportunity to debate the social science aspects of sport and the Games itself, and more particularly to showcase the wonderful resources of the British Library in this area. The medium of choice was the Internet, which would make the content we planned to include more widely accessible.

Designing the website was a complex process. It had to appeal to a wide audience, from those with a basic interest in the subject to those doing advanced research. We hoped to have something for everyone: bibliographies of the BL sport collections; original research produced by staff and external contributors, links to relevant materials on the web; and details of new events and publications. A great deal was learned in the process, not least the mechanics of site architecture and the editing and creation of pages in the Dreamweaver software. This was also where our training as librarians came in handy: what topics would we divide the subject up into and where would we fit the different contributions we received within this framework? Subject classification began to reveal itself as a very inexact science!

However, perhaps the most rewarding part of creating and maintaining the website was the opportunity it gave us to make new acquaintances outside the Library. Keeping a watchful eye on people researching in the field from undergraduates to university professors; blogging and tweeting information about the progress of the website and the Games; commissioning articles and researching the BL collections; liaising with publishers: all these aspects of Sport and Society improved our knowledge of the wider sports research environment and the needs of those working in it, and also revealed the often untrodden pathways in the Library’s sports collections. This combination of factors proved very fruitful for all concerned, as we discovered what types of material interested researchers the most, and identified gaps in the collections. Wonderful images began to emerge from obscure books and journals, like this one:

Don't Ride Horses

One of the indirect outcomes of our concentration on the London Games and sporting resources more generally in 2012 was a number of events in the Library which really raised the profile of the collections. The first was our conference, Sourcing sport in May 2012 which looked at the Library’s sports collections across the range of the social sciences and humanities, and which shone a spotlight on such topics as Dutch canal pole vaulting & mass sports and physical education in the USSR. This event was soon followed by the Olympex exhibition – an IOC-sponsored philatelic exhibition centering on the Olympics & Paralympics which showed numerous philatelic items and artefacts owned by collectors from around the world. The Library was able to fly the official Olympic flag while the exhibition was on, and was presented afterwards with its own London 2012 torch.

So it’s win-win for all concerned when it comes to engaging with what’s going on in the wider non-library environment, not least because all our hard work won’t be going to waste. Sport and Society will soon be archived in the UK Web Archive, along with other sites about the London Olympics and Paralympics, and will therefore continue to be available to the researchers of the future.