Disability History Month: Accessibility and Archives
“For disability, see infirmities”
This is one of four blogs written for Disability History Month 2025 - you can read the other blogs here (published each Thursday up to 12th December) alongside other Disability History Month blogs from previous years.
In this guest blog Professor Lucy Delap reflects on the challenges even experienced users of archives faced when searching for disability and Deaf histories. Currently completing a book project based on research into the lives of disabled people in the United Kingdom in the 20th century, she is particularly interested in experiences of labour and employment and has published on the labour of ‘labelled people’.
In my historical research, I regularly use records associated with hospitals, asylums and settlements. Nonetheless, I'm very aware that these have been over-prominent in the writing of disability histories. Most disabled people did not live in institutions. As a result, their lives left fewer archival traces. My major source base has been published and unpublished autobiographical writing and oral histories. I am triangulating memoirs with sources produced by charities and the state and using the former to challenge the perspectives and assumptions of those who produced the latter – usually non-disabled decision makers and powerholders.
Given the scarcity and unpredictability of many archival holdings on disability, it has often been hard to justify a visit. For many years, I would simply gather archival materials for my disability research as a side line, when visiting archives for other research projects. It is only in the last few years that this project has taken centre stage. I have sometimes made lengthy visits, to see material that turns out to be irrelevant or barely more than a trace. On other occasions, I have made a speculative visit to a records office or the uncatalogued private collections of a charity and found a treasure trove of material of which I had no inkling. More typically, relevant material does exist, but it is buried in amongst a multitude of other items. Of course, this is normal for archival work. But researching on disability and impairment does pose some quite specific problems and challenges.
Infirmities and ‘silver badge men’
Changes in terminology are common across many historical fields, but in disability and Deaf histories they are particularly charged with stigma and conceptual complexity. Archivists and researchers need to be careful not to project backwards contemporary terminology, as Joanne Edge has argued. It can take many iterations of searching using many possible available historical terms to find content relating to disability and impairment. Many of the terms are not self-evident; ‘silver badge men’ emerged for example in World War One to refer to those discharged from the military through injury, and for a few years became a useable umbrella term for disabled veterans (who had been awarded a silver badge, see preview image). Relevant terminology can also overlap frustratingly with other quite general terms. I have spent a long time trawling through records of ‘disabled’ ships, lame horses and legal handicaps.
In some cases, catalogues and indices have absorbed terminology of the period they represent. I was enormously grateful to the proactive archivist team at Brunel Archives and Special Collections, who painstakingly helped me comb through the index entries for the Burnett Collection of Working-Class Autobiographies. We had realised that material on impairment was buried within the much wider index entry on ‘infirmity’, even though the index had been constructed in 1985, a historical moment of high visibility for disability and deaf histories after the 1981 United Nations International Year of Disabled Persons. There are no entries at all for ‘disability’, ‘handicapped’ or other similar terms.
Violence in the archives
The stigma attached to impairment, past and present, can sometimes spill over into violently hate-filled material which poses cataloguing dilemmas. I recently sat down with an undergraduate student to do an initial search together for his project on the history of people with Down Syndrome. The first items that came up, without warning, at one of the UK’s most prominent national institutions were part of a song collection in their sound archive. The titles alone contained horrifying descriptions of violence towards disabled people. These had been catalogued without any apparent sensitivity check. The institution immediately took them down when I flagged them up. The entries were so egregious that there was no question about whether they could stay in the public domain of their catalogue. More typically, however, catalogues must reflect to some degree terms that were acceptable in the past but have become unusable today, because they are embedded in titles of texts and organisations. Particularly for those with lived experience of impairments, this can make the research process exhausting and upsetting. Catalogues and box lists need to more aware of the insidious assault of encountering such language. Perhaps a ‘harm statement’ such as that in the header of the University of Washington Libraries should be best practice for all?
Ableist assumptions pervade our world, today and in the past. It will require willpower and work to make catalogues and listings a safer and more inclusive space. I'm surprised to see the extent to which catalogues use language such as describing a historical actor who ‘suffered Down Syndrome’ – or often, the now outdated, ‘Down’s Syndrome’. Individuals with Down Syndrome are sometimes catalogued under the name of their parents, even though the description makes clear what their own name is. Archives rarely produce ‘easy read’ material that is accessible to people with intellectual/learning disabilities, even when collections specifically relate to their experiences. Hospitals are sometimes described in catalogues in problematic ways. One, for example, reads: ‘The success of the institution is seen in the steady increase in the number of patients, from 43 in 1863, to 120 in 1881, increasing to 350 in 1911’. Such statements absorb the medical logics of the archival material itself, dating from carceral periods of the 19th and 20th centuries. For individuals subject to ‘care’ within such institutions or who have experienced medical trauma, a rising headcount was not a success story, and catalogues should not recycle these kinds of assumptions.
‘Patients’
My research has also drawn heavily on published autobiographies, such as that of the Jamaican-born London crossing sweeper Edward Albert, (see preview image). Finding these in libraries often relies on the keywords under which they are catalogued. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these can be deeply problematic; librarians have clearly been troubled about how to list them. My own university library has them under a host of keywords, including ‘people with disabilities’; ‘patients – biography’; ‘poliomyelitis – personal narratives’; ‘handicapped persons’. Some books simply have no keywords, making them effectively invisible to researchers. I have sometimes resorted quite productively to shelf browsing close to memoirs I’ve found that relate to disabled people's lives. But serendipity and labour-intensive book by book searching are not ideal ways for researchers to operate. In any case in my university library, the vast majority of these rarely-used autobiographies, often self-published by ‘unknown’, first time authors, are in storage. This makes them particularly time-intensive for researchers to call up, especially those who may be unfamiliar with the library and archive environments and procedures. Resources such as the Bodleian’s guide to disability and Deaf histories are therefore particularly valuable.
Finding - and using – material on impairment and disability in archives and libraries is no easy matter. My own research has been the most laborious and demanding I’ve ever undertaken in my research career of over two decades. It involves painstaking work with catalogues, sometimes using older ‘legacy’ databases, indexes and websites that look abandoned and unloved, or are very text-heavy. For those without archival experience or with conditions that affect their attention and focus, this is likely to be very challenging. For those with sensory impairments, adaptations such as alt text descriptions, transcripts and captions are often absent.
Archivists and libraries have been enthusiastic allies and supporters of my own work. Liz Wood and her colleagues at the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick must get a special shout out for their commitment to making useable many of the MRC collections, particularly the extraordinary Trade Boards records that shed light on workers with impairments in the early- to mid-twentieth century. I also welcome the George Padmore Institute’s recent launch of some great examples of accessible ‘easy read’ guides, produced by activist and researcher Paul Christian These offer brilliant examples of how rich archive holdings can be, but also of the labour needed by archivists, libraries and researchers to make materials on disability discoverable, and to enrich and diversify history writing, libraries and archives.
Image: Europeana 1914-1918 project, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons