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If anyone ever doubted the importance of history, the last few years have proved them wrong. It is now fiercely contested how the past should be understood and represented, how it has been used, and how the understanding of the past is – or should be – used for building better societies. The entire construct of European history is challenged to be re-represented and re-understood through the lens of past colonial expansions and violence, as is therefore also the physical interpretation of past in public spaces and in museums.

I was a student in the 1970s and much of the discussion is comfortingly familiar, but it is also very different. Much more prominent now are for instance issues around racism, racial injustice and the power disequilibrium between those coming from former colonised backgrounds and the institutions and the narratives of former colonisers.

Public spaces and museums have been prominent in the headlines, sculptures of slave owners thrown into harbours, and the ownership of objects contested. Libraries have had much less public attention, but internally there have been many debates.

The Consortium of European Research Libraries is the international focal point for the engagement with the written heritage of Europe, represented by the collections of our members and beyond. We focus on manuscripts and printed books produced before the middle of the nineteenth century. CERL is where library and information professionals work together so that people can gain the full, connected meaning from our distributed collections.

The challenges to how our past is understood gives us new obligations to people who do or could use the books and manuscript which we steward, by the same token it also gives us new opportunities for highlighting the importance of the material the use of which we are interested in promoting.

Museums typically select parts of their collections for display and help make the chosen objects understandable and meaningful.  Libraries typically leave the interpretation of the books which they hold to other people to use and interpret. The role of the librarian is preponderantly to make books and information findable and accessible. Or to put it more theoretically, a library catalogue entry is a heuristic tool, while an exhibition label is hermeneutic.

But the heuristic tools of libraries do not come down readymade from above. They are created by people and inevitably reflect knowledge, norms and attitudes which at least to some extent were prevalent when they were created. The current debates give us an opportunity profoundly to re-consider our metadata, the information held in our systems about our collections, how it has been created and what means to people now, and also how it should be changed and by whom.

It also gives us pause to shine a light on themes like cataloguing backlogs, for which it has previously been very difficult to find funding and the differential levels of cataloguing which make some parts of our collections very easy to discover, others much less so. Who should have thought that backlogs and retrospective cataloguing could have become politically important!

It also gives us an opportunity to re-engage with the history of our collections, their economic foundation, and indeed to give a new meaning to work on the provenance of individual items.

Our collections contain texts and images which are deeply, offensively racist, for instance violently antisemitic. While I think most agree that there should be no question of making it harder to find such things in our collection – we are here not to celebrate the past but to enable a critical engagement with it – there is a question of how we should deal with it for instance in the context of digitisation projects. This begins to take us closer to the world of museums, with the selection of items for public display, not least because some digital projects are surrounded by various levels of interpretative text. And libraries of course also mount exhibitions …

CERL is setting up various mechanisms to work with our member institutions in engaging with these and with a whole range of related themes. This is not going to be easy for us, but we enter into this with the mindset that this is an opportunity for us to get better at doing that which is our core function, giving people meaningful access to documentation of the past. Through its extensive network CERL will seek to help member institutions to get in touch for informal and confidential advice with colleagues who have relevant experience. CERL also offers members tailored workshops examining issues around managing collections which are potentially culturally sensitive.

We hope soon to organise a workshop on metadata from a cultural property perspective. If you are interested in contributing, please let us know at secretariat@cerl.org.