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EDI Summer Reading Challenge

Abstract colourful shapes. Text reads: Summer Reading Challenge, libguides.ncl.ac.uk/edi.

Summer is the perfect time to embark on a journey, broaden your horizons and soak up a different culture or perspective. So, the team behind our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) library guide is delighted to re-launch a summer EDI reading challenge.

Since its launch in autumn 2020, we’ve been using the guide to curate and highlight print and online resources of all kinds, relating to EDI themes, such as those listed in the University’s EDI priorities. We’ve compiled themed sections and monthly highlights of books, films, social media, archives, podcasts and more, and encouraged suggestions from staff and students across the University to help us develop our collections.

So why not take up our Summer EDI Reading Challenge?

Recommend and Review

Look through our themed reading lists on our Recommended by You & Blog page and explore life through a new lens! We hope you’ll find some inspiration, but we’d also love to receive your recommendations too, and we’ll be highlighting them on the guide.

You’re welcome to use the online form on the lib guide. If you can give us a few words to explain your choice, that would be great! You can see what people recommended last year on our EDI in Literature page.

Social Media

We’ll be running a promotional campaign on social media throughout summer, using the hashtags #ReadingForPleasure and #EDIReadingChallenge. Please look out for these and retweet/repost wherever possible.

Have a great Summer everyone! We’ll leave you with the inspired words of the Poet, Derek Walcott:

I read; I travel; I become.

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Black History Month: Proud to be

Our book carousel on the EDI guide

October is Black History Month, with the theme Proud to be: “inviting black and brown people of all ages throughout the UK to share what they are proud to be.”

On the Library’s Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) guide, we’ve highlighted books and other resources from our collections which focus on black British people and themes across many fields, such as politics, law, music, art, business and literature.

Please take a look, and if you would like to suggest books which you think we should add to our collection, we’d love to hear from you: just fill in our suggestion form.

We’ve also compiled a Black History Month themed playlist on Box of Broadcasts, with a great collection of films and documentaries.

Don’t forget to explore the other sections of our EDI guide too: it aims to curate and highlight information resources of all kinds, relating to different EDI themes. You’ll find books, films, social media, digital and physical archives and more. We’d love to get your recommendations for anything we’ve missed, and you can still catch up on our summer reading challenge if you’d like to be inspired, or inspire others.

You can read about Newcastle University’s events to mark Black History Month here.

And watch out for a really interesting Black History Month feature from our colleagues in Special Collections and Archives, coming up later this month….

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New resource in focus: Race Relations in America

Continuing our series of blogposts exploring our brand new humanities e-resources in more depth…

We have recently bought access to Race Relations in America. This is a collection of primary source material covering Civil Rights in the USA from 1943-1970.

This archive contains a huge range of primary sources. Before you dive in, we’d recommend clicking Introduction, in which you can learn more about its scope and features.

The sources come from the records of the Race Relations Department of the United Church Board for Homeland Ministries in New Orleans, and comprise many different types of material, including pamphlets, audio recordings, survey data, photographs and speeches. These sources are supplemented by secondary materials such as contextual essays, maps and thematic guides to give you ideas for interpreting and exploiting the archive.

You can browse or search the archive contents by clicking Documents (to browse) or one of the two search options. You can filter your search in various ways, e.g. by document type, year or theme. If you just want to view images or listen to audio, click the relevant buttons on the top menu.

Have you used Race Relations in America? Please feel free to post your comments and experiences by clicking Leave a comment below.

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New resource in focus: African American Communities

Continuing our series of blogposts exploring our brand new humanities e-resources in more depth…

We have recently bought access to African American Communities. Focusing predominantly on Atlanta, Chicago, St. Louis, New York, and North Carolina, this collection presents multiple aspects of the African American community in the 19th and 20th centuries, through pamphlets, newspapers and periodicals, photographs, correspondence, official records and oral histories.

This archive contains a huge range of primary sources. Before you dive in, we’d recommend clicking Introduction, in which you can learn more about its scope and features.

The primary sources include many different record types, including pamphlets, images (including 360 degree view), official records and oral histories. These sources are supplemented by contextual essays to give you ideas for interpreting and exploiting the archive.

You can browse or search the archive contents by clicking Documents (to browse) or one of the two search options. You can filter your search in various ways, e.g. by document type, year or theme. If you just want to view images, click Image Gallery.

Have you used African American Communities? Please feel free to post your comments and experiences by clicking Leave a comment below.