‘The only rewarding thing for me is to bring to light information that no one knows. What’s the point of rehashing the same old thing?’

Please join us for our Black History Month #WINspiration as Professor Zita Cristina Nunes, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, introduces Dorothy Porter: the critical cataloguing pioneer whose groundbreaking work continues to shape our profession. Fighting tirelessly against racist institutional structures (and an all-too-familiar lack of funds), the multilingual Porter worked creatively to cultivate an international network of fellow librarians, book dealers and bibliophiles, using her connections to build one of the world’s leading repositories for Black history and culture: Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.

Porter identified the need to challenge the racism embedded within the Dewey Decimal System – where 326 ‘slavery’ and 325 ‘colonisation’ were often the only shelf spaces to include Black authors – and classified her collections instead according to genre and author: centring work by and about Black people within scholarly conversations around the world, often for the first time, and highlighting their untold foundational role across all subject areas. Among the array of works she collected in African languages was the rare Otieno Jarieko, an illustrated book on sustainable agriculture written by Barack H. Obama, father of the future US President.

As our libraries tackle the task of decolonisation today, what can we learn from Porter’s legacy? And what does her vastly under-acknowledged contribution tell us about the history of librarianship, the herstories that are missing and why?

This Black History Month #WINspiration is free, online and open to all. Please register here to receive the Zoom joining link a few days in advance.