This year’s Libraries Week, the annual showcase of what the UK’s libraries have to offer, is centered around the theme of Taking Action, Changing Lives, with the aim of “highlighting the diverse ways that [libraries] take action with and for their community and make a positive impact on people’s lives; to showcase their central role in the community as a driver for inclusion, sustainability, social mobility and community cohesion”. 

Within this initiative is featured the upcoming Facet publication Narrative expansions: interpreting decolonisation in academic libraries, edited by Jess Crilly and Regina Everitt. The book “explores what is specific to colonial contexts that has impacted knowledge production, how these impacts are still circulating in our libraries, and what we can do about it.” 

Two members of our department (CAL) and of the Decolonising through Critical Librarianship group have contributed to one chapter of this thought-provoking publication, titled Cataloguing, Classification, and Critical Librarianship at Cambridge University. The chapter examines the different practical experiences, thoughts and proposals around decolonisation in cataloguing and classification explored by Cambridge colleagues from the African Studies Library, the Scott Polar Research Institute Library and the Latin American and Iberian Collections team from CAL. 

We are very pleased to say that as a taster for the book, Facet is offering this chapter as a free download: https://www.facetpublishing.co.uk/page/detail/?K=9781783304974.

We hope you will enjoy it! 

Clara Panozzo and Christopher Greenberg