Further to discussion in response to my blog on the theme of race I have committed to making an intervention to improve the discoverability of library items related to several decolonising projects ongoing at LCC Library. The idea as expressed in my response to a query regarding the long term effect of such projects was to add appropriate terminology to the bibliographic records of works studied and written about by the cohort of MA Publishing students engaged in the LCC.’Decolonising the Archive’ project.
CONTEXT:
One of the works considered in my blog is Sara Sallam’s At Last, I Hold Your Gaze. It is formally and intellectually rich work that has the possibility to open up contested histories to new interpretation, a sensitive yet angry riposte to the long history of plunder and fetishisation to which the West has subjected Egyptian culture. In creating bibliographic records for such work the cataloguer has options via subject headings and fuller descriptions to create greater opportunities for the discovery of the work and to connect it to other texts correcting the historical record and offering new representations of marginalized people. My blog describes a tactic employed in these decolonizing sessions of restricting information to researchers in order to stimulate material awareness and discovery via deep research. For many of the works we selected for these sessions the catalogue records are so slight as to provide the researcher only cursory bibliographic information anyway, thus further restriction was hardly necessary. While the tactic is useful in stimulating close reading and it fails utterly as common practice for discovery.



Figs. 1-3: At Last I Hold Your Gaze. Sallam. S (2020)
I have emended the record for At Last, I Hold Your Gaze to provide the author’s description, linked to her site, added subject headings and created a public OPAC list for it and the other items in the decolonizing project. Consider the opportunities for discovery of the rest of this list, one or two records such as Rhiannon Adam’s award winning Pitcairn Island / Big Fence, are with rich bibliographic data opening up research avenues, but most records reveal little of the contents of each work and offer no enticement to call them up. Most of the works considered have the further limiting quality of being part of our Special Collections, hence the record is the only route to discovery. A great deal of our records suffer similar neglect though the unavailability of fuller bibliographic information from publishers and the time pressure on the centralised cataloguing team for UAL. This is essentially a time and resource problem: work such as Sallam’s and all of our zine collection (5000+ zines) are self-published and require detailed descriptive work that our catalouging team cannot give them. While we have been successful in attracting HEFCE funding for cataloguing posts in recent years to address uncatalogued work in our collection, pitching for funds to revisit inadequately catalogued work is a less attractive and feasible pitch to funders. I note in my response to fellow student comments on my blog past critical cataloguing projects in this mode and current activity at Chelsea, however, these projects generally need a significant lead time and dedicated staffing. In my position as head of collections at LCC I cannot afford to assign non-cataloguer staff time to this work, hence my proposed intervention is my own targeted emendation of records to improve discovery.
PROPOSED INTERVENTION:
- For exisitng Decolonising 2026 list add subject headings and fuller descriptions. For works included in the project booklet publication link record to record of that publication to allow its decolonial reading to be promoted.
- Promote project via refreshed LCC Special Collections page (Autumn tern). Create list and adopt same approach for 2025 list for the project.
Reference List:
Adam, R. (2021) Big Fence; Pitcairn Island. Blow Up Press.
Sallam, S. (2020) At Last I Hold Your Gaze. Self-published.
Image List:
Figures 1-3. Sallam, S. (2020) At Last I Hold Your Gaze [Book], Photography by Clarke. G (2026).