Curator and Senior Researcher, The British Library | London and New York, 2018

Dr Leila Nassereldein delivered a major collecting intervention within the British Library’s Contemporary British Publications team, addressing the persistent absence of zines, artists’ books and other non-ISBN publications from the national record.

The project began from a structural contradiction. Legal deposit is intended to preserve the full breadth of publishing in the United Kingdom, regardless of format or language; yet the mechanisms through which publications are discovered, acquired and catalogued have historically been calibrated towards conventional publishers and established channels of distribution. Small-run works exchanged at fairs, sold through independent networks or passed directly between makers could therefore remain unclaimed – not because cultural production was absent, but because the institution had not developed adequate means of recognising it.

For Nassereldein, this was more than a gap in holdings. An archive does not simply receive what history has already deemed significant: through acquisition, description and preservation, it helps produce the distinction between historical evidence and cultural ephemera. What enters the catalogue acquires permanence, discoverability and scholarly authority; what remains outside is made more vulnerable to disappearance.

Working with considerable independence, Nassereldein analysed the Library’s existing holdings, established new acquisition criteria and designed a collecting strategy capable of reaching publications beyond standard workflows. She built direct relationships with zinesters, artists and independent publishers across the United Kingdom and New York, acquiring works at source and physically returning material to the British Library. The collection centred publications by people of colour, securing within the national collection forms of political, artistic and subcultural knowledge that had too often circulated without institutional recognition.

Comparative fieldwork at the New York Public Library and Brooklyn’s Interference Archive informed the strategy. NYPL’s continuing acquisition of alternative and small-press publishing demonstrated the value of active, specialist collecting, while Interference Archive offered a model in which materials produced by social movements are held as collective history and activated through public use.

Nassereldein directed the project across its full institutional life: research, selection, purchasing and budget management; liaison with makers; conservation and cataloguing; supervision and public interpretation. She developed an online exhibition and produced a formal strategic report setting out policy recommendations for the continuing acquisition of non-ISBN material. Her work resulted in more than 150 zines, artists’ books and independent publications entering the British Library’s collection in perpetuity, alongside an operational framework through which the field could continue to grow.

The intervention did not simply insert marginalised material into an otherwise complete archive. It demonstrated that the apparent completeness of the national record had been produced through particular systems of recognition. By changing those systems, Nassereldein altered not only what the British Library contained, but what it had learned to recognise as publishable, collectable and historically consequential.