Women's Archives/Women's Collections: What does the Future Hold? - Women's Archives Symposium

Register now for a Women's Archives Symposium - Tuesday, August 13, 2013 (during the SAA Annual Conference)

Symposium Overview: Perspectives on Women's Archives: A Reader (ed. Tanya Zanish-Belcher with Anke Voss) will be hot off the press when SAA convenes in August.  Join us to celebrate its publication and ponder some of the issues it raises in a one-day symposium just the day before the opening of the conference.  Panelists will offer remarks to generate discussion on several topics:  the continuing relevance of separate women's archives, the impact of the digital world on record creation and use, and the role of the citizen archivist.  We look forward to a lively conversation among archivists, scholars, and the Reader's authors about the future of women's archives.

For more information and to register visit the symposium website:
http://tulane.edu/newcomb/womens-archives-womens-collections-what-does-the-future-hold.cfm

Comment on the WCRT Bylaws!

We are pleased to announce that the WCRT Bylaws Committee has completed our first draft.  We are asking for member feedback on this draft before we send it in to the council for approval. Go here to read the draft and please comment on the blog, below this post or email alexandra.krensky@gmail.com or enovara@umd.edu.  We would like your comments by April 15, 2013. 

THE SCHLESINGER LIBRARY AT THE RADCLIFFE INSTITUTE AWARDED $150,000 TO DIGITIZE BLACKWELL FAMILY COLLECTION

Leaders of Social Reform in 18th, 19th, and 20th Century America 

 

Grant From the National Historical Publications and Records Commission 

Elizabeth Blackwell, ca. 1850-1860.*

BOSTON, Mass.— January 29, 2013—The Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study today announces the launch of a new Blackwell Family digitization project supported by a grant from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) (Link: http://www.archives.gov/press/press-releases/2013/nr13-24.html). The $150,000 grant funds a two-year project (http://www.archives.gov/nhprc/awards/awards-11-12.html) to digitize five Blackwell Family collections, which span from 1784 to 1981 and detail the activities of members of the Blackwell family, who were leaders in abolition, prohibition, healthcare, women’s suffrage, and education.

“We are grateful to receive this grant from the NHPRC to digitize our archival collections of the Blackwell Family, who were leaders of historical importance in the social reform movements of the 18th to 20th century. This digitization project helps bring the library’s holdings on the lives and work of women in America to researchers and the public in new online formats,” said Marilyn Dunn, executive director of the Schlesinger Library and librarian of the Radcliffe Institute.

The grant enables the Schlesinger Library to digitize 189,074 pages of the Blackwell Family collection, featuring correspondence, diaries, financial records, photographs, drawings, writings, and other papers of four generations of the US branch of the family, assembled by George Washington Blackwell and his descendants.

The collection records travel, professional work, and civic and reform activities of the members of the close-knit family. Among the most well-known members are Elizabeth (1821–1910), the first woman to earn a medical degree, and her sister Emily (1826–1910), also among the first woman doctors. Both women fought for public health reform and equal education and medical training for women. Their brother Henry Browne Blackwell (1825–1909), his wife, Lucy Stone (1818–1893), and their daughter Alice Stone Blackwell (1857–1950) are known for their leadership roles in the abolition, women’s suffrage, and prohibition movements. Their sister-in-law Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921), wife of Samuel Charles Blackwell (1823–1901), was the first woman ordained as a minister in the United States and an active speaker on behalf of abolition, women’s rights, and prohibition.

The Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute will invest an additional $150,000 to meet the cost of the project, “Those Extraordinary Blackwells: Leaders of Social Reform in 19th and 20th Century America.” The scheduled completion of the digitization project is June 2015.

About the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study

The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University is dedicated to creating and sharing transformative ideas across the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences. The Fellowship Program annually supports the work of 50 leading artists and scholars. Academic Ventures fosters collaborative research projects and sponsors lectures and conferences that engage scholars with the public. The Schlesinger Library documents the lives of American women of the past and present for the future, furthering the Institute’s commitment to women, gender, and society. Learn more about the people and programs of the Radcliffe Institute at www.radcliffe.harvard.edu. 

* Image: Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University.

Contact:

Karla Strobel

617-495-8608

karla_strobel@radcliffe.harvard.edu

Introducing the WCRT Bylaws Committee!

Our two volunteers have been selected, and we now have a full bylaws committee.  In addition to our existing leadership, our new committee members are Kate Colligan (kate.colligan@gmail.com) and Bethany Anderson (bgandrsn@gmail.com).  The committee will be evaluating our next steps in the coming weeks and will be soliciting input for by-laws from WCRT members, so watch the listserv and blog for that!

Kelly Wooten- Make Your Own History

I recently co-edited the anthology Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century (Litwin Books, 2012), with Lyz Bly, an instructor of gender studies and history at Case Western Reserve and Cleveland State Universities, who earned her doctorate in American History from Case Western Reserve University in 2010.  

I started thinking about this book three years ago in 2009 when Emily Drabinski, the editor for the Litwin Books Series on Gender and Sexuality in Information Studies, emailed me out of the blue and asked if I would be interested in writing a book about zines after being referred to me by Jenna Freedman, the zine librarian at Barnard. My initial reaction was no, thanks, but then I realized this was a great opportunity to further explore some questions I had been asking about how to document the modern feminist movement beyond zines. I also knew that I wanted to explore these ideas from a variety of perspectives, and to produce a volume that was accessible to a variety of audiences—not just librarians, archivists and academics. To this end, I invited Lyz Bly, who I knew through her time at the Sallie Bingham Center as a Mary Lily Travel Grant recipient when she was researching the zine collections for her dissertation Generation X and the Invention of the Third Feminist Wave.

Once we started exploring this topic, we realized it was hard to address without including pieces about queer activism and second wave feminism due to the intersectionality and fluid nature of feminism. I hope this book will highlight the Bingham Center’s leadership in documenting the modern feminist movement, but also share the other work being done at other institutions and encourage other archivists and activists to participate in this process since these movements are far too big for just a handful of archives to document. 

Make Your Own History addresses the practical and theoretical challenges and advantages of researching, documenting, and archiving recent and contemporary activists in the feminist and queer movements. Chapter topics include zines, documenting the LGBT community, the future of collecting electronic and online records, and how the women of the Second Wave continue to contribute to the feminist movement.

Janice Radway, Walter Dill Scott Professor of Communication Studies at Northwestern University and professor emerita of Literature and History at Duke University, recommends that this collection “should be read by librarians,  archivists, and book historians everywhere who are thinking critically about how best to preserve and study the record of lives lived outside and beyond the limits of the conventional.”

Read more about this book in an interview with Michele Burger on her blog “The Practice of Creativity”: http://micheleberger.wordpress.com/2012/10/08/archives-as-activism-documenting-feminist-and-queer-activism-interview-with-author-kelly-wooten/

Post submitted by Kelly Wooten, Research Services and Collection Development Librarian for the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture at Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library, and Librarian for Sexuality Studies for Perkins Library.

Call for Volunteers for By-laws Committee

WCRT is looking for two volunteers to join the co-chairs and vice
co-chairs on a committee to develop by-laws for the roundtable.  This
year, SAA has required all roundtables to have their own by-laws.
This is a great opportunity to become more involved in the roundtable
and have a say in our leadership!  Our final draft of the by-laws will
be issued by next year's annual meeting, so the drafting process will
be going on over the course of this year.  If you're interested or
have any questions, please email Elizabeth Novara (enovara@umd.edu) or
Alex Krensky (alexandra.krensky@gmail.com).

WCRT Meeting Minutes - August 8, 2012, San Diego, CA

Women’s Collections Roundtable Annual Meeting 2012 

Meeting Minutes – August 8, 2012, San Diego, CA

Chair: Kathy Hertel-Baker (facilitator)

Vice Co-Chairs: Elizabeth Novara (notetaker), Alexandra Krensky (unable to attend)

1.    Presentation by Anne Hoiberg – President of the President of the Women’s Museum of California and the International Museum of Human Rights at San Diego

2.    Installation of New Officers

a.    New Co-Chairs - Liz Novara and Alex Krensky.

b.    July election results: Helice Koffler and Tali Beasley are the new co-vice chairs.

3.    By-laws for the WCRT

a.    SAA is requiring all roundtables to have formal bylaws, primarily so that there is more transparency and clarity, especially with the election of roundtable leadership.

b.    WCRT needs volunteers to form a by-laws committee to review the by-laws of sections and other roundtables to determine what would be most appropriate for the WCRT.

c.    There was some discussion about why this was necessary, since roundtables were originally determined to be very informal groups.

d.    A call for volunteers will be made after the annual conference is over.

4.     Women’s Collections Mini-conference, Pre-Conference in New Orleans

a.    Susan Tucker, Curator at Tulane University, requested that we discuss the possibility of having a mini-conference or a pre-conference at the next annual meeting in New Orleans that focused on women’s collections.   

b.    Members discussed this idea.  Some possible questions for the conference to focus on: What progress has been made in documenting women?  What changes in the way researchers conduct research have occurred?  Where do women’s collections currently fit in the archives profession?  What about in other professions, such as history and labor?  Could we focus on a timely issue within collections such as women’s reproductive rights, domestic violence, privacy concerns?  Finding women’s collections within institutions that aren’t necessarily focused on collecting materials related to women?

c.    What is the impact of the economy on women’s collections? Are there difficulties in bringing in collections especially without funding?  Are we not soliciting as strongly because we have too many other responsibilities?  Much of the funding for women’s archives come from second wave women’s movement and we need to interest other people in addition to this group of women.  We are starting to run out of storage space and electronic records are a new challenge since many women’s collections were established.

d.    Another idea was to focus on the new Women Archives Reader which will be published next year.  (A flyer with information about the reader was distributed.)

e.    The Big Berks conference was mentioned – could WCRT do something in collaboration with this conference?

f.      Honoring our foremothers in SAA.  Next year will be the 24^th year of the founding of the WCRT (1989).  Should we celebrate the 24^th or the 25^th year?

g.    There was agreement that it might be difficult for attendees to acquire funding to attend a day early if WCRT held a pre-conference.  It might make more sense to just extend the time of the regular WCRT meeting.  We should also extend invitations and information to other constituencies who may be interested, i.e. women’s religious communities, graduate students at local universities in Louisiana.

h.    Perhaps a morning session could focus on nuts and bolts and an afternoon session could have scholarly presentations??

i.      Mention of desire to update Andrea Hinding’s 1979 guide to archival and manuscript sources on women.   

5.    WCRT Bibliography

a.    Liz will be posting a bibliography of sources relating to women’s collections on the website.  This bibliography will focus primarily on archival. Manuscript, and special collections and will consist of scholarly research on the topic of these women’s collections (i.e. not necessarily research completed using women’s collections as sources.) 

b.    Links can be included to online resources such as LibGuides or other guides to finding women’s collections.  Also, sample instruction assignments on how to use women’s collections will be included. 

c.    A call will go out on the WCRT listserv to review the bibliography and to suggest additions to the bibliography. 

6.    Blog

a.    WCRT leadership will make a greater effort this year to keep the blog up-to-date. 

b.    Members are also encouraged to submit posts for the blog.  This would greatly assist in keeping the blog interesting and informative!

c.    WCRT will send out a once a month reminder to submit posts. 

7.    Session Proposals for the 2012 Conference

a.    Possibly a session on the new Women’s Archives Readers (if not used for the mini-conference)

b.    Topic ideas: Women religious archives? Material culture? 40^th Anniversary of Roe v. Wade anniversary? ERA? Public policy?  Planned Parenthood archives?  Women’s political collections?

8.    SAA Council – no questions to bring up

9.    News and Updates from the Group

a.    Make Your Own History: Documenting Feminist and Queer Activism in the 21st Century – Kelly Wooten has just published a new book!

b.    Women’s archives at Perdue University recently endowed by the outgoing president, who was the first woman president of the university (a possible blog entry?) 

Attendees:

Kathy Hertel-Baker, Sisters of Charity of Nazareth

Elizabeth Novara, University of Maryland

Lucinda Manning

Janice Ruth, Library of Congress Manuscript Division

Jessica Sedgwick, Harvard Medical School

Kelly Wooten, Duke University

Jolene Beiser, Pacifica Radio Archives

Kathleen Feeney, University of Chicago

Morna Gerrard, Georgia State University

Deborah Rice, Wayne State University

Anne Hoiberg, Women’s Museum of California

Fernanda Perone, Rutgers University

Sammie Morris, Purdue University

Danelle Moon, San Jose State University

Karen Mason, University of Iowa

Debbie Richards, Smith College