Introduction
Senate House Library (SHL) is the central library for the University of London and the School of Advanced Study, and contains two million books plus numerous special collections and archives on the arts, social sciences and humanities. These are housed in offsite stores and a multi-storey central building designed in the 1930s by Charles Holden, and reimagined by George Orwell as the fictional Ministry of Truth. That the building was used by Orwell to invoke the power of the state should not surprise us, but, as Ian Beilin has pointed out, libraries built in imposing styles summon instead the power of (elite) knowledge.Footnote 1
The way in which the library has historically developed means it is organised according to several classification schemes, the most prominent of which are Dewey, the Library of Congress and Bliss. Library readers, therefore, need to navigate not only book stacks on multiple floors but also a variety of numerical and alphabetic codes before they locate the books they are seeking. Thus we can see that both in terms of the architecture of the building and in the internal logic of the collection and its organisation particular ways of thinking are being manifested. Whilst we offer a wide variety of inductions and research sessions to students to assist them with orientation of the physical and theoretical space, attendance at these is voluntary. In addition, the library currently restricts access to members of academic institutions, or those willing or able to afford to pay membership fees. We therefore began to consider who might not be coming to the library, and how the particular quirks of SHL's multiple classifications and collections could potentially be seen as barriers to access.
Whilst many students have no problem navigating the library, this workshop sought to address specifically potential library users who had hitherto not engaged with the library space and therefore could share their insight into why this might be in order for the library to gain further understanding of why people may struggle to feel at home within its structures. These issues are of course common to many academic libraries and whilst the workshop was tailored to Senate House, and therefore the examples in this article are particular to its systems, it is hoped that the workshop served to highlight a method of engagement with library structures which could be utilised in other similar libraries.
Library anxiety
It is over thirty years since Constance A. Mellon's study Library anxiety: a grounded theory and its development was published. Mellon's research of six thousand students found that the majority felt anxiety in relation to the library and that ‘most of the students who discussed their fear of the library talked about the feeling of being “lost”’.Footnote 2 The loss highlighted by Mellon's study was primarily related to physical library spaces and resource navigation, both of which are particularly pertinent to a library of the size and layout of SHL.
Alongside this, however, there is another sense of loss which stems from the organisation of knowledge within the library. Howard and Knowlton stated, in relation to the Library of Congress classification and subject headings, that library classification can ‘exhibit “othering” tendencies – that is, presenting historically marginalized people as fundamentally different from white heterosexual men’.Footnote 3
This is not solely a Library of Congress issue. In Bliss, for example, the location of ‘French Literature outside France in North Africa, Middle East and Asia’ resides as an adjunct of French literature rather than on numerous shelves reflective of the hugely disparate regions from which the literature originates. The library's classification schemes mean book organisation can mirror the world views and biases of the creators of those schemes, thus risking alienating many potential readers who may not be able to find themselves on the shelves. Combining these considerations of physical and classificatory barriers we decided to organise a workshop with the aim of critiquing and attempting to disempower both.
Approaching OOMK and Thick/er Black Lines
As librarians we work daily within, and are therefore part of, the library structures we wished to discuss, and the classification schemes are part of that daily reality. Could we, therefore, provide a sufficiently analytical gaze and would workshop attendees view us as too much part of the structure to feel comfortable fully participating? Instead of creating the workshop as part of our regular induction schedule we therefore decided to approach OOMK and Thick/er Black Lines to research and develop the event, whilst we would attend in the joint roles of participants and co-hosts.
OOMK and Thick/er Black Line's previous work on libraries and archives was well known to us: their participation in UCL's Centre for Editing Lives and Letters’ 2014 conference Failure in the Archives, and one of us had worked with them during their 2015 Future Library residency at Open School East. We admired their deep reading on the subject of library access and the creative ways in which they presented their ideas concerning both library history and futures. From this point on, the librarians’ role was focused primarily on navigating administrative structures, utilising our position as ‘insiders’ within the organisation to ensure that Heiba, Rose and Hudda received payment not only for running the workshop but also for their research time. Funding was sought via application forms and meetings, culminating in the full amount being received from the Library's own engagement budget.
The invitation
The invitation to design an artist-led workshop in response to Senate House Library prompted by the motivation of two of its librarians, Leila and Laurence, was an exciting and unexpected one. Gifted with temporary library cards to roam the building and its contents, we set about locating where the function of the library and our artistic practice might meet.
For two of us at least, this was something of a return, with all the knowledge of intervening years. As undergraduates within the University of London system we had access to Senate House if we made the effort of applying for a library card (or knew we were able to apply for one). We had been wide-eyed first years within the library's walls but graduating had left us on the outside looking in; during our initial meetings in our capacity as artists we had to be collected at the security gate by staff as we were no longer members.
A library the size of Senate House, with its competing cataloguing systems, and numerous floors, wings, nooks and crannies, is no easy thing to understand. For the uninitiated and unfamiliar, as we had been, navigating its space and resources from the ground floor up could be a daunting activity. The inability to locate a book often felt like a personal failure, silent confirmation that we did not know how to be here.
We took that initial feeling of alienation, of disorientation, as our starting point. Coming to understand the library takes place through a (re)orientation of the user to its existing structure and systems of classification, its theoretical as well as its physical space, as ‘a reality that must be accommodated by the student’, as Hope Olson writes. It is through this (re)orientation that ‘we perpetuate the dominance of story “told” through the classification.’Footnote 4 This story or goal of library classifications, a technology to bring human knowledge together under a single unifying, universalizing structure and language, is rooted within the white European colonial endeavour. Classification, the arrangement of knowledge objects, creates and perpetuates categories of representation that speak to all the hierarchies and biases of this endeavour.Footnote 5
These insights, stemming from and underlying our artistic practice, point towards an examination of how raciality as a socially constructed mode operates through classification to organise power, anointing as well as disempowering.Footnote 6
We decided to experiment in creating an alternative library induction, one that used disorientation as its starting point and from there looked critically at how we become (re)orientated and what we become orientated towards when we use the library. By embedding the problems of classification in our content and in our method, we aimed to make visible the invisible structures and dynamics at play and so contest the presented objective neutrality of the library. The workshop was an exercise in empowering users to both ‘place’ and ‘find’ books and themselves, but more importantly perhaps, be empowered by an appreciation of the library both in physical form and subject matter as a necessarily alienating space with classification systems not designed for all library users to place and find themselves.
Research
In addition to deeply insightful conversations and presentations of special collections from Leila, Laurence and other library staff our research as cardholders took the form of walking, finding and placing. Focussing on the 4–6th Floors of the library we spent several days, both individually and together, familiarising ourselves with the different collections and classification systems, and in particular with category titles.
We were attuning ourselves to biases, hierarchy and conflict. Where did certain books strain against their categorisation? Where were books missing? Where did they de-legitimise their classification systems? Where did they reify and reinforce them? This open-ended inquiry became something of a treasure hunt, an energy we hoped to impart in the workshop.
We listed examples of these books wherever we found them. The Psychology of Women: Psychoanalytic Perspectives by Arnold D. Richards and Phyllis Tyson was found on the 6th floor within Psychology. This text and all texts relating to Gender/Sexuality were classified under “Special Groups and Conditions”, a category which includes: Homosexuality (IID), Parenthood (IIF), Loneliness (IIM), Imprisonment (IIS). As such, issues concerning women are classified under “gender” – however, gender as a category is dominated by issues concerning women. Implicit in categorisation are the biases within the academic discipline - even as these issues have been critiqued and addressed within the literature – and the library classification system maintains these implicit biases.
The Structure of the Cotton Economy of the Antebellum South edited by William N. Parker was placed in the collection US Studies/ Textile Industry/ Cotton and was a striking example of how classification and shelving could neutralise relationships within collections and so our conceptual framework in understanding areas and topics. All the titles in this section are agricultural and industry related titles, written by white authors, and in most texts enslaved people of African-descent are referred to only as ‘workers’ or ‘labourers’. The role and operating-mechanics of racial chattel slavery, specifically the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade within the production of cotton is noticeable in its absence. It was significant that these texts on cotton production were separated from slavery, and the topic of slavery itself largely located and contained elsewhere, about six stacks away in Black History. What does this do for our understanding of racial chattel slavery within global capital and mechanisation in the US and beyond? What were the reasons behind the choice in classification?
These books and more would form the basis of the alternative induction in which participants would navigate their way around the library and to the books and respond to a series of prompts about them.
The workshop
Together, we agreed that with this small window of opportunity to intervene in the library we wanted to aim our workshop at non-library cardholders. This was something of a conundrum. Non-library cardholders would be less able to re-enter the library once the workshop was over unless they attached themselves to a University or purchased a seasonal pass (£70-£210, or a one-day reference pass for £5).Footnote 7 There were, however, other ways to access the library, through free talks and lectures, the archive, which is open to the public, and exhibitions and events like these which left room for ‘unofficial’ exploration.
The workshop was designed in three loose sections and was preceded by a welcome and introduction to Senate House library by Leila and Laurence, who talked about the history and function of the library, the various classification systems, and their duties as librarians. Their description of their work, from allocating budgets, managing new acquisitions, to working on reclassification, framed the library as a site and technology maintained by day-to-day human labour and decision making and therefore both culturally informed and reflective of social power.
With six to eight attendees ready the workshop moved into the first activity. Each participant was given a small activity pack consisting of a library map, a pencil, a book title with a floor and classification number and a book mark with a list of questions to consider. The purpose was to explore the library and return with the book they had been allocated. For some it was the first time they had searched for a text within a classification system and on their return this opened up conversations on our relationship to ways of knowing. The library and the book-hunt elicited different responses. Some participants returned without a book, unable to locate it, others described how they had asked for help, while others related their numerous attempts before finally figuring out in which direction the classification and shelving worked with each other, and their feelings of confusion and frustration. While some hurried back with their books, others used their time to explore the rest of the library.
How did you feel? Some out of place, others lost in place. We talked together about where those feelings of disorientation come from. How are we meant to know how this library works? What are the ways we learn or figure it out? Is there a right way to learn? How are different modes of scholarship organised? The discussion led to the topics of each of the books and a brief presentation on why we had chosen them (a few examples were mentioned in the section above), and how their classification or inclusion in the library was significant. Together we deconstructed the classification systems’ seemingly neutral structure of ‘first terms’ which were in fact hierarchical and reflective of historic and current power structures.
The final element of the workshop consisted of a bookmaking exercise, in which photocopied pages of each of the books were collaged together by participants and us as workshop facilitators, copied and compiled to create a playful new collaborative text. This newly created text acted to document the workshop but also to physically interject and intervene into knowledge production with the library, as well as to attempt to somewhat confound the library classificatory system by its presence in the catalogue. We concluded the workshop with a provocation to participants, to appreciate the library as a dynamic site that should and can be responsive to all library users, not as a gesture of goodwill but as an ethical imperative and to make demands on the library to fulfil this.
Conclusion
The Library Examined provided four hours in which to reflect on, discuss, and critique the organisation of knowledge created by the various classificatory systems used within SHL. As librarians, we benefited from being both co-hosts and also participants, and to see first-hand how the workshop attendees responded to the library environment, most experiencing it for the first time. As outlined, our aim with the workshop was to reduce, through critique and discussion of classificatory biases, the chances of library anxiety or feelings of being lost. Whilst these issues with classification systems remain, and are replicated in other academic and public libraries which organise their books using the same systems, the workshop succeeded in its aims by creatively and critically allowing participants to consider that any sense of being lost they might feel whilst searching for themselves on the shelves comes from an external rather than an internal source. By acknowledging the biases of library classificatory systems, their position as barriers to access begins to shift.
