Interested in going on this trip in May 2025? View our Iconic Library MayX 2025 page for more info!
On May 12th, 16 Furman students led by 2 librarians, Libby Young and Paige Dhyne, flew to the UK to visit and explore libraries, museums and archives. They were using the idea “information has value” to explore how documents, books, manuscripts and other items have been preserved and made accessible. They wanted to see whose story is being told and given value. Are more diverse voices being heard? How does the monetary value of information affect its accessibility?
Starting in London, the group visited the British Library and the British Museum. They visited a popular and lucrative bookstore, Daunt’s Books to hear about the independent book selling business. Then they visited the Black Cultural Archives in Brixton to hear from public historian and Wikipedia contributor Kelly Foster. She talked about Wikipedia’s usefulness as place where marginalized peoples’ stories can be told. Students chose to use their free time to ride the London Eye, stroll by Buckingham Palace, explore the Victoria & Albert Museum, have tea, shop in Camden town, take in a professional football game and get to know the Tube. A river ride up the Thames brought them to Greenwich and a stroll around the Royal Observatory.
Leaving London, they traveled to visit the publisher Adam Matthew in the village of Marlborough. Adam Matthew digitizes millions of archival records, adding metadata and enhancing accessibility with transcriptions and OCR (optical character recognition). Those records are then made available to researchers (like at Furman) on a subscription basis. Because Marlborough is close to Stonehenge, they also made a trip there to see some prehistory that is still posing questions to everyone who sees it!
A day trip to Cambridge University brought them to see the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology and then to the University Library. Cambridge and Furman belong to the USS (Universities Studying Slavery) that brings together schools with a legacy of slavery either in their founding or continuing heritage to proactively expose, study and make reparations for their past. Cambridge curators, archivists and librarians spoke to students about Cambridge’s efforts to “decolonize” their collections, and the group got to see and interact with artifacts from the Black Atlantic exhibit.
Next they moved to the lovely walled city of York that was founded by the Romans, invaded by the Vikings, and has long been a center of religion and learning in England. Besides a walking tour of the town and a visit to Jorvick, an imagined Viking settlement, students spent time at York Minster and the York Minster archives. There they were invited to interact with 14th and 15th C manuscripts and think critically about clues they give us to the ages they were created in.
From there they moved on to Liverpool. It was made rich from its shipbuilding and slave trading past, is the epicenter of much of England’s beginning of rock and roll (such as the Beatles), and today is a hotbed of football (soccer) rivalry! A visit to the Liverpool Public Library and Records Office archives gave us a sense of how the city keeps its past alive and keeps telling its story. Students also visited the Slavery Museum; an interactive museum called the British Music Experience; and took a “Magical Mystery Tour” of all things Beatles in Liverpool.
About 40 minutes to the south of urban Liverpool is idyllic and pastoral Hawarden, Wales. The group of students traveled there to the only residential library in the UK, Gladstone Library. Founded by the longest-serving Prime Minister in England’s history, William Gladstone, it was envisioned as a place for scholars, researchers and writers to come away for contemplation and work. Starting with Gladstone’s own collection of books, it continues to grow as a resource and retreat for book lovers as well as book creators. Their librarians and archivists prepared a deep dive for our students into some of their archival materials, using critical librarianship to question wealth and privilege not only in the materials but also in the very organization of the archives. Our students worked hard to uncover how voices of women, working class, uneducated, disabled and other marginalized groups were ignored or silenced.
Throughout the trip Furman students met with lots of contradictions—the British Museum has wonderful collections, yet many contested collections hide a murky past of being stolen from cultures under British colonization. Gladstone is a lovely institution where they enjoyed a welcoming stay, but it celebrates a man whose family was the largest slave holding family in the UK, and whose power derived in large part from the money earned through forced labor. The librarians and archivists students met with showed them how the past is still very much a part of the present, and their work of preservation is not about minding old dusty things, but keeping them very much in the public eye to keep telling their stories. Despite struggles with funding, with physical barriers, with contesting narratives, they work to have their collections speak. The more voices telling their stories the better because information does have value—historically, monetarily, socially and culturally!