Social Science blog

Exploring Social Science at the British Library

3 posts from October 2019

21 October 2019

Spare Rib archive - possible suspension of access UPDATE

Update (26th January, 2020): Further to our previous updates, the Government has committed to delivering the EU Withdrawal Agreement by 31 January 2020, after which the transition period will apply. The Spare Rib digital archive is expected to remain available until the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020. Further details will follow as these are confirmed. Original text of post as follows:

In February 2019 the British Library determined that if the UK leaves the European Union (EU) without a deal it will be necessary to remove from access the full run of digitised Spare Rib magazines hosted on the Jisc Journals platform. If the UK were to exit the EU on 31 October without a deal, therefore, the Spare Rib digital resource will no longer be available as of this date. Should a Withdrawal Agreement be finalised before that date, the resource will remain available until at least the end of the transition period.

The decision to close down the Spare Rib resource once the UK has left the EU was made on the basis of the copyright status of the digitised magazine, which relies heavily on EU orphan works directive. This directive allows in-copyright material held by cultural institutions to be made available where rights holders cannot, after due diligence searches, be identified. Spare Rib was published between 1972 and 1993 and as a consequence its content is still in copyright.

When we digitised the magazine the Library sought the permission of rights-holders for their work to feature in the online archive. We successfully obtained permission from 1080 contributors. Around 57% of the magazine however – some 11,000 articles and images from 2,700 contributors – benefits from EU orphan works protection. Should the UK leave the EU this legal exception will no longer apply and we have therefore taken the decision that the resource will need to be closed.

The closure of the Spare Rib digital resource will be felt by the many students, researchers and activists who use it and for this we apologise. As some compensation we can confirm that the British Library Spare Rib site, with contextual essays and selected magazine content will remain accessible.

For additional background and context about the Spare Rib digital archive and its potential suspension please see the British Library’s blog from February 2019.

17 October 2019

The past is now: Examples of Britain’s anti-immigrant policies from independent Black and Asian community publications

scan of Mukti 1983 article

'Our right to be here challenged ... what we should know' - articles in Mukti magazine, June- August 1983

Emma Abotsi, British Sociological Association Fellow at the British Library, writes

One of the most rewarding aspects of my research is calling up documents at the British Library and discovering a new collection of stories that tell me something about the world in which a particular document was created as well as how it relates to our society today.

Independent community publications from 1960 to 2018 form a large part of the archival materials I am using for my research. These consist of newspapers, magazines and booklets produced by Black and Asian community groups and activists in Britain that offered spaces where people were able to connect with others with similar lived experiences. In addition to articles about racism and other forms of social inequalities, discussions about anti-immigrant policies are a common topic in these publications.

For example, I discovered an article in the June-August 1983 issue of Mukti, a multi-lingual feminist magazine for Asian women, discussing changes to immigration rules in that year. The authors report that these new rules will impact the citizenship status of women and children, particularly from Black and Asian communities in the UK. The magazine includes information about groups that were being organised to campaign against these immigration laws and urged women to apply for citizenship in order to ensure that their children born after January 1983 will be UK citizens.

Around the same time as I was looking through the British Library’s collection of Mukti magazines, I came across this piece just as an interview with British-Nigerian Jazz artist, Bumi Thomas was published on BBC News in August 2019. In the interview, Thomas explains that she faces deportation from the UK despite being born in Glasgow in 1983. Her parents were unaware of the changes to the immigration laws that came into effect six months before her birth and assumed she had automatic citizenship rights like her older siblings. Thomas’ case highlighted the ongoing effects of such anti-immigrant policies and also how independent publications like Mukti served their communities in their attempts to keep people informed about these laws and to fight them. According to the BBC article, Thomas appealed against the Home Office decision to deport her and her case is due to be heard in October 2019.

As the numerous ongoing cases (including the Windrush Scandal) starkly reveal, struggles against issues such as anti-immigration laws and racism are sadly not confined to the particular historical moments that publications like Mukti were produced in; they are very much in the present and continue to have often dire consequences for people in this country today.

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Mukti: Asian Women's Magazine, issue 1

09 October 2019

The 2019 Annual Equality Lecture: Jack Halberstam

We are delighted that Jack Halberstam, Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, will deliver the Ninth Annual Equality Lecture in collaboration with the British Library and the British Sociological Association. This will take place on Friday 1 November 2019, 19.00-20.30, in the British Library Knowledge Centre Auditorium.

Professor Halberstam will provide a very timely consideration of the history of Trans* communities, and examine their association with political goals and a quest for recognition. They will also offer up new and different aesthetic avenues to Trans* lives and images, and be signing copies of their latest book Trans*: a Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (2018).

In this book, Halberstam explains the inclusion of the asterisk at the end of the word ‘Trans’ as moving the idea of transition resulting in a final form, an ultimate destination and beyond established configuration of desire and identity. The asterisk, they argue, stops any sense of knowing the meaning of any given gender varying form, and gives Trans* people authorship and authority of their own categories.

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Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability (2018). British Library YC.2018.a.15460

This idea of ambiguity or flexibility in categories does not sit easily within a library and museum context, where material is defined, catalogued and archived for posterity.

Yet, libraries, and the worlds of words they contain, have long been a refuge for people excluded from the normative and major narratives of history and nationhood. Minorities of all types often seek evidence of themselves in the past, buried in the traces left behind. The validation of finding someone like you living and surviving in a different time, who may be long dead, can be transformative.

The exploration of the past for a minority history can be painstaking in terms of time, labour and emotional investment. However, these research journeys and the stories they uncover can have profound implications for the majority, the archive project, and the subscribed historical norms.Libraries do not just keep our stories safe; they are where new stories begin. 

Technology offers new opportunities for communities to find themselves in archival records. The British Library and its partners have digitised over 20 million individual pages of printed news media, and the use of optical character recognition (OCR) enables searches hitherto impossible in the past.

In 2018, the British Library invited Trans activists E-J Scott (Curator of the Museum of Transology), Dr Jay Stewart (Chief Executive of Gendered Intelligence), and Annie Brown (activist, artist and GI youth worker) to consider two articles found in the British Library digital newspaper collections: ‘The woman in man’s attire’ (Tamworth Herald, 1901) and ‘An extraordinary investigation’ (Sussex Advertiser, 1833)

 

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‘The woman in man’s attire: a remarkable marriage story’, Tamworth Herald (1901)

When gender varying individuals approach the binary space of archived and not archived, the past and the present collide and the researcher is subject not only to the temporal nature of our present language around gender, but also the historic lack. In this conversation between Annie Brown, E-J Scott and Dr Jay Stewart, we get a glimpse into the impact that the historical record can have for communities still fighting for representation and inclusion.

Steven Dryden (Sound and Vision Reference Specialist and co-curator of Gay UK: Love, Law, Liberty and LGBTQ Histories)