With funding provided by the Wellcome Trust this project is intended to improve the accessibility of the British Library of Development Studies (BLDS) Legacy Collection, ensuring it becomes an invaluable and enduring research resource for a new generation of scholars. The project has been jointly managed by the University of Sussex Library and IDS.
Hosted on the University campus the BLDS Legacy Collection tracks the unfolding story of international development over the last half century and provides an unparalleled resource for better understanding the history of evolving development interventions since the 1960s.
The BLDS Legacy Collection is uniquely comprehensive in its coverage of government and official sources, particularly those published in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia between the mid-1960s and mid-1990s, but additionally with selective coverage of other countries that were key sites of development research and innovation during this time (Francophone Africa, Middle East, North Africa and South/Central America).
Its value lies both in the breadth and scope of its contents, and the fact that the collection primarily derives from low- and middle-income countries where limited funds, civil conflict, environmental disasters and simple neglect have often led to substantial archival destruction.
The entire BLDS Legacy Collection comprises over one million items. These range from government and international agency reports and statistics; pamphlets and writings by civil society actors, research institutions and political parties; documents from participatory and community-based research; serials and related books from LMICs.
When the BLDS Legacy Collection Project commenced in October 2019 the majority of the collection was uncatalogued and largely inaccessible, as well as being stored in conditions unsuited to its long-term preservation.
By the end of the project in January 2023, the entirety of the BLDS Legacy Collection will be fully catalogued and available via the University of Sussex Library, completely rehoused in a refurbished environment and will have been widely promoted to UK and international academics, researchers and students.
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