By Alice Corble and Danny Millum
A couple of weeks ago we attended the ‘Decolonising the curriculum –the Library’s role’ conference at Goldsmiths, at which Alice was speaking. Given that the University of Sussex Library is in the process of formulating its own approach to decolonisation, and that this is both an extremely important and yet often frustratingly vague topic, we thought colleagues might be interested in a quick report.
Danny, Caroline & Tracy take us on a trip down into the IDS basement…
Continue readingLeonard Cheshire intern Vicky Ward takes us through some of the stranger ‘health’ adverts in the Hills stamp collection currently being catalogued at the Keep…
Continue readingA Blog by Andrew Lycett, literary biographer and contributor to new TV documentary Rudyard Kipling: A Secret Life
As a new documentary about our local writer Kipling airs on Sky Arts this October we thought the time was right to revisit the writer’s claim on our beautiful county:
Continue readingby Clare Playforth
I’ve recently had an exciting visit to the Wiley European Distribution Centre with the Society of Indexers and because I am kind and you are lucky I’m going to share the experience here.
The Wiley warehouse is spread over a couple of units on an industrial estate in Bognor Regis and after arriving at this glamourous location we were treated to pastries and coffee and a chat about the history of the company: quite interesting. Then we donned our high vis and went on a 2.5 hour tour of the warehouse: very interesting.
Continue readingLooking after your mental health & wellbeing is something we all try to do, and there are services for students across campus, but…what about staff? We decided to try putting workplace wellbeing at the heart of the Library’s culture…
Continue readingFor Environment Week the Library Green Group has taken over the Library’s social media, and invited Jules Bristow to blog about her office plants.
I have a confession to make. The admin office was expensively renovated last summer to give us more space and a more logical way of integrating the team, but my favourite part of it remains my long sunny windowsill.
Continue readingAs it’s Stress Awareness Month, we thought we’d re-post this great piece from our own Antony Groves on Mindful Tech in HE.
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Freshers’ Week is on the horizon, signalling the Autumn term will soon begin, and that some of us will shortly enter the busiest time of our working year. While we are planning how best to support our new and returning students, we should also consider our own wellbeing. One way of grounding ourselves during this busy period is mindfulness. If our days are a chain of events, mindfulness encourages us to focus on one link at a time.
Continue readingLast month I realised that we’d approached an important anniversary. No, not the Beast from the East (thank you Google), but Reference Only books. In the spirit of good project practice, and customer service excellence, I thought it would be fun* to have a review of the outcomes, one year on. But first, some background.
* I don’t get out as much as I used to.
Morwenna Silver volunteered at The Keep last year, helping to catalogue the donation of Julius Carlebach’s papers to the German-Jewish Archive. Here she writes about Carlebach’s reading of Marx, what constitutes antisemitism, and the power of language in a politically unstable culture.
More info on the Carlebach collection can be found on The Keep’s website:
http://www.thekeep.info/collections/getrecord/GB181_SxMs92
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Julius Carlebach had the most extraordinary life. Born in Hamburg in 1922, he and his sister escaped the Nazis via the Kindertransport. He was a sailor in the Royal Navy, and went on to manage a Jewish orphanage in Norwood in South London and then served as a rabbi in Kenya. Also an accomplished academic, he was a research student at the University of Cambridge, and taught at the University of Bristol before he eventually became Associate Professor of Sociology and Israel studies at the University of Sussex. A vast collection of Carlebach’s correspondence, academic papers and research notes has recently been donated to the German-Jewish Archive at The Keep by Carlebach’s family. Continue reading