Charter for Decolonising People’s Collection Wales

Heritage collections often hold colonial, contested and racist content. As a federated partnership, moreover, People’s Collection Wales is led by three national institutions – Amgueddfa Cymru, the National Library of Wales and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales – which recognise the role that colonialism has played in their institutional histories, structures, practices and collections.

Established in 2010, People’s Collection Wales (PCW) is a national digital collection that captures, protects and celebrates the diverse histories of Wales and its people. It is firmly rooted in democratic, empowering and collaborative practices: as the people’s collection of Wales, anyone can contribute their materials to the Collection via an easy-to-use platform (website), and we work in close collaboration with communities and heritage partners across Wales to enable and support these contributions.

Nevertheless, we recognise our privilege and power in shaping narratives and making connections, both through the authority of the three federated partners and through our role as contributor, moderator, curator, preserver and promoter of content. So while many of the items (and their interpretations) in the People’s Collection Wales are user-generated and therefore not ‘owned’ by us, as an inclusive, safe and trusted platform we are ultimately responsible for its decolonisation.

This charter lays out our approach. It highlights 4 key areas where we will work with individuals, communities and local museum, archive and library (‘sector’) partners across Wales to decolonise the Collection. In doing so, we will contribute to the wider work of the three national institutions to decolonise themselves. We recognise the importance and educational value of capturing for future generations the history of how material has been interpreted in the past. Instead of removing any problematic items, we will i) put our Collection into context, ii) keep a record of any changes to our descriptions that we make via ‘audit trails’ and iii) constantly review the language we use to ensure that it reflects best current usage.

For more information about our practical approach to decolonising our Collection, please see our Decolonising Toolkit. This provides a step-by-step guide, for us and our contributors, to creating decolonised descriptions and leaving ‘audit trails’ to record this work.

Collectively, we commit to decolonising the way we curate, interpret, learn, engage, develop and communicate with our audience. The decolonising process will be central to developing People’s Collection Wales and will be everyone’s responsibility.

What does this mean?

Decolonisation is a process of restorative justice that seeks to dismantle the systems, institutions, and ideologies of colonialism that still serve to perpetuate inequalities today. Although the issue of race inequality sits at the core of the decolonial project, we also understand that racism and its systemic structures cannot be disentangled from other prejudices, including but not limited to patriarchy, heteronormativity, transphobia, ableism, religious prejudice, and classism.[1] For us, decolonising our Collection involves addressing all areas of prejudice and colonial legacy.

We will work with our sector and community partners and use the People’s Collection Wales to confront historic and present-day injustices. This will support us to reflect on and change out-dated ways of working. Our collaborative approach to archiving gives us an opportunity to represent diverse perspectives and ensure that decisions regarding our items are made collectively. However, this comes with its own difficulties, and we need to be transparent about what we can and can’t achieve. As a digital collection proactively inviting external contributions, we do not have ownership of many items and their interpretations. We must be judicious and sensitive in the way in which we choose to reframe or challenge content that does not reflect our values, but we will never edit our users original interpretations or remove their uploads (except in accordance with our existing takedown policy).

Holding ourselves accountable

Decolonisation demands that we remain accountable for the decisions that we make as a heritage organisation and that we are committed to ongoing evaluation, learning and improvement. We must address the enduring effects of colonisation on marginalised individuals and recognise that the words we choose to use and the stories we choose to tell at People’s Collection Wales can continue to have negative impacts on people today. We are aware that our decolonisation work will be gradual, and that something small like adding inverted commas around a derogatory term might seem trivial until we are able to uncover more information about our items and provide appropriate historical context that will help to dismantle these colonial and racist ideologies. We also understand that the relabelling of items and addition of advisory notices is only a small step in a much larger process that needs to take place for us to decolonise our Collection in a meaningful way. It is our intention to not only denormalise harmful and discriminatory terminology in our Collection, but to evolve as a resource that challenges dominant colonial narratives and empowers marginalised communities to assert their own perspectives.

Being a community archive, we have an important role to play as a platform for people to have agency and control over their own narratives, heritage and histories. It is our goal to be inclusive of all people who create, use and are represented in our Collection, but we acknowledge that we can only achieve this through a sustained, permanent commitment to our decolonisation agenda. Over time, we hope we can contribute to healing and reconciliation by providing a space for truth-telling, acknowledging past trauma, and promoting understanding, empathy, and dialogue among different community members.

We are always open to feedback and will continue to adapt our practices to address emerging ethical considerations, decolonial approaches, and evolving community expectations. If you would like to share your thoughts with us or work with us to decolonise our Collection, please get in touch via [email protected].

Centring 'communities of relevance'

The term ‘communities of relevance’ refers to groups that hold knowledge, perspectives and experiences that we consider pertinent to understanding and addressing the colonial legacies within our Collection. This concept recognises the importance of engaging with and centring the voices and insights of peoples who have relevant lived experience or specialised knowledge, acknowledging that these communities themselves are the most knowledgeable about their own experiences, needs and histories. 

How will we do this?

The four core pillars of People’s Collection Wales are:

1) the Collection itself (and the online platform on which it sits);
2) the training and support we offer to local community groups and organisations on how to contribute to the Collection (this ranges from training in digitisation, archiving, content curation, oral history, metadata and copyright, to equipment loan and support in bulk uploading);
3) the support we offer on how to transform these contributions into a resource for teaching and lifelong learning; and
4) the promotion of the Collection to a wider audience through social media, newsletters, blogs and talks/presentations.

Decolonising PCW will focus on 4 key areas of work:

1. Maximising our digital and democratic nature

The digital and democratic nature of PCW offers a unique opportunity for decolonisation. Not only do digital tools enable wide and diverse access (including to audiences and communities of relevance across the world), but it also offers the possibility of ‘remixing and reassembling’ materials.

PCW is founded on the premise that regardless of who contributes it, any item in the Collection can be reused by others to create new collections and tell different stories. While there is a light-touch moderation process (all users are requested to ensure that the content they upload meets the PCW Terms and Conditions), there is no privileged ownership by a few who control the narrative.

  • We will invite contributors to disrupt, review, question and revise any colonial narratives, and to create new, decolonialised ones.
  • We will continue to support community groups and sector partners on their digitisation journeys.

2. Strengthening the moderation process

While we have described it as ‘light-touch’, any moderation process has the ability to change the narrative – both negatively and positively. Thus far, our moderation of user-generated content has focused only on legality rather than on any other element of the item or its interpretation. To support the team in implementing this decolonisation charter and to ensure that such decision making has input from communities of relevance, we will establish a Network of Moderation Advisors. We would foresee this Network to be consulted whenever we receive potentially colonial, controversial or racist content, asking members for advice on the best approach (for instance, to add a content warning explaining the historical context, to help the contributor review the description, or any other course of action).

  • We will invite members to our Moderation Advisory Board who can advise on decolonisation matters.

3. Auditing the Collection

At the start of 2022 People’s Collection Wales held over 150,000 items, around 3,000 collections and over 600 stories, and these numbers grow every day.

We will commit to carrying out an audit of the Collection to:

  • identify any racist and prejudiced content;
  • identify any content that has links to colonial aggression or the transatlantic slave trade; and
  • identify any content that includes colonialist history.

4. Carrying out a ‘deconstructive’ pilot project

While we view ourselves primarily as facilitators and enablers, providing the means for people to explore their own history, decolonising the Collection demands a more proactive approach. As the three national institutions leading the PCW programme, we will reflect on our own collections and choose some key examples to demonstrate our commitment to decolonisation.

  • We will carry out a pilot project whereby we choose a selection of items from Amgueddfa Cymru, the National Library and the Royal Commission – whether they be objects, photos, documents or exhibition panels – and ‘deconstruct’ these for educational purposes.

We will share this work on the website to help communicate our decolonisation work, and as a starting point for further discussion and engagement.

We will also extend an invitation to our local museums, archives and libraries sector partners to join us in this exercise.

Who will we do this with?

As per the slogan, Nothing About Us Without Us, decolonisation requires input from those most affected by empire, racism and prejudice. Engagement with these communities of relevance lies at the heart of decolonisation. This requires relationship building and works in parallel with equality and diversity work. Such community engagement is key to the work of PCW. Through our online and community engagement, we encourage individuals and groups to share their often-untold stories. This promotes marginalised peoples’ access to and engagement with Wales’s culture and heritage (and, by extension, its institutions). This, in turn, builds trust and confidence which is needed for people to feel they can take part in the decolonisation process.

  • We will continue to develop relationships that value community knowledge, expertise and lived experience.
  • We will act as a bridge between communities of relevance and the museums, archives and libraries sector.

By acting as a gateway to Hwb, the learning and teaching platform for Wales, PCW supports sector partners and community groups in creating resources which are available to all teachers and pupils in Wales.

  • We will act as a bridge between communities of relevance, sector partners and Hwb.
  • We will ensure that any teaching and lifelong learning resources which relate to colonial aggression, the transatlantic slave trade or colonialist history, are decolonial in their approach. 

We will also make best use of our federated constitution by incorporating good practice resulting from the decolonising work by the three key partners. This may include definitions and criteria for reviewing collections, glossaries, toolkits and any other helpful materials.

Finally, a note on decolonisation in the context of Wales and its relationship to England. We appreciate the complexities around this topic. This charter has been drafted in response to the Welsh Government’s commitment in its Anti-racist Wales Action Plan to forge an anti-racist Wales.[2] We use the term decolonisation here in that spirit and context, wishing to be a part of that process.

Additional PCW documents that link to this work:

PCW Digital Collection Policy
PCW Digital Curation Policy
PCW Digital Access and Use Policy

Acknowledgements

This document is based on Amgueddfa Cymru’s Charter for Decolonising Amgueddfa Cymru’s Collection and the Museums Association’s Supporting Decolonisation in Museums.

People’s Collection Wales would also like to thank everyone who has provided feedback during the drafting of this Charter.

[1] Carissa Chew, ‘Decolonising Description: Addressing Discriminatory Language in Scottish Public Heritage and Beyond,’ Journal of Irish and Scottish Studies.

[2] In 2022 the Welsh Government published its first Anti-racist Wales Action Plan: https://www.gov.wales/anti-racist-wales-action-plan. This Plan was developed in collaboration with a wide range of communities and organisations, and sets a vision for an anti-racist Wales by 2030.