Just a few days before the March lockdown, the Decolonising through Critical Librarianship group, which includes two librarians from the Collections and Academic Liaison department that curates this blog, applied for a University Diversity Fund grant to upgrade our online platform.
The latest in our series of racism/anti-racism posts relates to Eastern Europe. This is just the beginning of a collection of resources on the topic, and future posts will include material to broaden our coverage to include more areas, countries and topics: this list covers mostly Ukraine, Russia and part of the Balkans. Continue reading
Over the years, Cambridge University Library has gathered an important collection of Francophone and (North) African / Caribbean material and postcolonial studies, through a selection policy in foreign languages and translations beyond what we receive by legal deposit. It ranges from history to philosophy, literature, sociology, politics or arts (see previous blogpost on “Black models” in visual culture and modern arts). However, only some of these resources are available as ebooks: unfortunately, few titles in French are currently available online, with the exception of the Open Access platform OpenEdition. A lot of extra (Anglophone) resources were opened to members of the University of Cambridge on temporary access during the COVID-19 outbreak. Cambridge University Library has just subscribed to the packages EBSCO Ebook Academic Collection and Proquest Academic Complete, which total c. 400,000 ebooks. Gallica, the online portal of the French national library, holds many resources (digitised books and periodicals), but because of copyright, only extracts are available for many relevant works. The list below, which is completed by additional bibliographic e-resources on the French collections website, is only indicative and focuses on the 20th century. Continue reading
In line with recent events linked to the Black Lives Matter movement, this blog post features ebooks and other titles dealing with racism and social prejudice in Spain, Portugal and Portuguese-speaking Africa available to Cambridge students and researchers.
Among the worldwide reactions to the killing of George Floyd, protests have taken place across Scandinavia. Much of the local media coverage of these events assumed a display of solidarity with the United States and perpetuated the misconception that racism was something belonging to other countries. However, the participants were also highlighting current problems of systemic racism in their own countries along with the need to face up to their colonial past. Continue reading
europeancollections.wordpress.com 