Inclusive Design Special Collection

How to use the collection

The Inclusive Design Special Collection is housed in the library at the Royal College of Art and can be visited by appointment. The collection catalogue, including brief descriptions of every item, can be searched online. If you are planning a visit, we recommend that you start by identifying items of interest using the online search facility.

Searching the special collection

We recommend you begin with a search in a single field (see below). You can enter incomplete words, so for example in the author field, 'smith' will find 'J Smith', 'M Smith' and so on. 'Wil' will find 'Williams', 'Wilson' and so on.

Combining two or more fields will produce results that meet both criteria (a boolean 'and') - for example entering 'Coleman' in the author field and 'ageing' in the subsidiary reference field will find all items by anyone called Coleman about ageing, but not about any other subject.

An initial search will take you to a page where all the found items are listed in reverse chronological order (most recent first), with year of publication, Author name(s), title, language and location. Location refers to the physical location within the collection, to allow you to find the document if you visit.

If you click on the title of any item on this list, you will see a more detailed page which includes a brief description of the item. This should allow you to identify specific items that interest you, before visiting.

Author or Title

If you know the title or author of the item you are looking for, enter it in the author or title box and click 'find'.

Category

Searching by category is the best way to find all the key items on a specific topic. The collection is divided into 20 categories, and an item only belongs to a single category. A detailed explanation of the material listed in each category can be found here.

Keywords

A number of subsidiary references or keywords are given for each item. Searching this field will give more results than a Category search, but may include items with less relevance.

Abstract

Each item has a short description of one or two paragraphs which can be searched for any word. This allows you to find references to specific terms or names which are not included in the subsidiary references.

Browsing

To browse the collection, you can follow the 'browse all records' link from the search page (which will return a list of all 1400+ items in the collection, in reverse chronological order, most recent first), or search by category (see above).