Reflections on Queens’ Legacies of Enslavement Project: Old Library Exhibition, ‘Enslavement and Salvation’

Queens' College old library BLOG

The University of Cambridge legacies of enslavement inquiry was instigated in 2019, in the wake of growing public interest in the issue of British universities’ historical links to enslavement. Yet this story of enslavement could not be told without input from the university’s colleges. It was partly with that in mind that a subsequent Queens’ Governing Body meeting invited the college’s librarians and historians to conduct an inquiry into Queens’ College’s legacies of enslavement.

John Ogilby, Africa: being an accurate description(London, 1670)[O.4.23]

Following much discussion between students and fellows, it was agreed that all interested Queens’ members would participate in a wide-ranging project to examine the biographies of as many eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Queens’ members as possible. Given that it was not until the lockdown in March 2020 that work began, the library team drew up guidelines so that students, fellows and librarians could do the research from home…

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Obsolete orders: the need to reclassify Queens’ War Memorial Library

Queens' College old library BLOG

“I knew what it was like to want a book and to buy it, but I had forgotten what it felt like to amble among the library shelves, finding the book I was looking for but also seeing who its neighbors were, noticing their peculiar concordance, and following an idea as it was handed off from one book to the next, like a game of telephone. […] On a library bookshelf, thought progresses in a way that is logical but also dumbfounding, mysterious, irresistible.”

Susan Orlean, The Library Book (Atlantic, 2019)

When librarians enthuse about classification systems to those uninitiated in the profession, there is not a small chance they will be met with words to the effect of “who cares?” Yet, as American journalist Susan Orlean reminisces, a reader with classmark in hand scanning library shelves for the matching letters and numbers from the catalogue they recently jotted down…

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