Amina Shah seems a thoughtful and eminently well qualified Librarian. Which makes her decision to exclude this book all the more baffling and upsetting.
A long and very interesting interview from last year:
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/10.3366/irss.2024.0026
'One of the things I think is most dangerous for libraries is when one generation doesn’t value what another generation has collected. I can see that with lots of cultural institutions. Andrew Pettegree, from St. Andrews, has written a book called The Library: A Fragile History, where he examines this subject.5 We feel very strongly that, in order to show how we’re useful to Scottish society, we don’t only need to focus on the future; we also need to talk about why we’re useful to people today. To be able to understand that, we have to know who we’re not reaching'
...
'We need to do some targeted outreach work to make sure that we’re connecting with young people, with people who might not have thought about us before, with older people, with people from communities who might not see themselves as reflected within our collections. We have to take steps to do that, to demonstrate that they are welcome here.'
...
'You might say, well, where are the silences in a collection that has everything? '
...
'Over the years, we’ve made decisions that are exclusionary. We’re making decisions about what’s important and what’s not important. '
...
'Some of the silences are around our interpretation of things. In 2021, we had a fantastic exhibition called Petticoats and Pinnacles about woman climbers in Scotland.11 We had diaries, letters, and journals of many women explorers, dressed in petticoats and high heels and all sorts of inappropriate clothing. They were out there doing these things. But, over the years, nobody thought that their accounts were worth publishing. Their stories weren’t brought together in any format, so their voices were, in a sense, silenced. That’s true of many women’s accounts, or accounts from women.'
...
'. So, some of the silences are around our own curation and our own research, and some of them are around the actual collections themselves. I don’t want to give you the impression that we’re not aware of our own arrogance here because every generation thinks they have an answer to solve the questions of the generation before, and I have no doubt that we’ll be making mistakes now as well.'
...
'Kate Ashley—I’m thinking of Scotland today. Fifty or 100 years from now, historians are going to want to know, for instance, what all the gender identity debate was in Scotland, and so much of that is taking place on Twitter, on Facebook, in these formats where someone can’t just go deliver the document to the library and have it preserved there. That’s a really interesting point that I’d never thought about before. It’s such a very important resource for historians and for cultural understanding as well.'
(Some of us have been busy archiving and have stashes of material on this very debate that may, one day, end up in the NLS. First of all, theough, they might want to spend £20 on a copy of the Women who Wouldn't Wheesht.)