Sensitive content warning

Historical objects and the records about them often reflect the period in which they were created. They can include offensive or contentious terms and imagery describing race, gender, class, sexual orientation, disability and mental health.

Some object descriptions have been taken directly from the material they are describing. Some of the text was written in past decades and reflects the social attitudes of the time and contains language we wouldn’t use today.

We believe this information is representative of the time and context in which the objects and records were created. It is, therefore, an essential part of the historic record.

However, we recognise that there is more work we can do to place our collections into context, and make our records more accessible and inclusive for everyone.

We are committed to improving our information and making our collections more inclusive and are working on a project to review and refine the language we use to describe our collections.

Our long-term aim is to avoid using broad, pejorative, excluding or generalising language when describing our objects.

Sometimes, we will need to work with words that are contested or still being debated. Where possible, we will be clear about why those choices have been made, to give context and to be as transparent about our workings as we can.

More about our commitment to inclusive cataloguing and improving our information.

We are experimenting with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and our collections data to enable better searching and make connections between related objects. Relationships between objects are created using an AI tool that makes connections based on descriptive text and other fields in our database.

The way AI works in practice means that sometimes the relationships between objects shown may not be immediately obvious or may be incorrect. Please help us by using the report function to flag any issues you encounter, so that we can fine tune the AI processes and deliver you better results.