Questioning the Past and Possible Futures: Digital Historiography and Critical Librarianship

The role of history as a discipline is, as Burton and Sweeny claim, not only to transform our understanding of the past and the present but also to shape possible futures. Digital historical projects are transformative endeavors that attempt to negotiate and navigate the past and articulate these possible futures. Drawing on the foundational ideas of critical librarianship to “intervene in and disrupt” structural inequities and on examples from digital historiography, we argue for a more robust role for librarians within these transformative endeavors. In so doing, librarians can use conscious, deliberate, reflexive actions to work toward animating values central to librarianship

Final evaluation report of the Heritage @ Huddersfield Project

This report forms the summative evaluation for the Heritage @ Huddersfield project (R2 delivery project) funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and University of Huddersfield and running from 2013-2017. Formative evaluation was carried out in 2015 and 2016 which contributed to the development of the project whilst running. The project aimed to create a beacon centre and Service through which the University’s heritage collections would be accessible to everyone. It was anticipated that the project would secure the long term future of the collections through conservation and cataloguing, and enable new ways for audiences to learn from and engage with them. Securing the future of the collections would mean new and wider ways could be developed to engage with audiences and to interpret the collections