Women and Social Movements, International: A New Online Resource for Transnational Women’s History

Thomas L. Dublin, SUNY Binghamton
Kathryn Kish Sklar, SUNY Binghamton

Abstract

We propose a slide presentation and talk by Kitty Sklar with Tom Dublin participating at various points in the discussion. After editing Women and Social Movements in the United States for a decade, we turned to the international dimensions of women's activism. Over four years we brought together 4,600 documents totaling 150,000 pages, covering the period since 1840. This online archive includes virtually all proceedings of conferences of women's international organizations since 1880, about 500 in all. We published the first release of the database with Alexander Street Press in January 2011 and expect the complete posting sources by March 2013.

The database draws on diverse documents offering broad temporal and geographic coverage of women's organized internationalism. Resources include materials from Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and the Pacific. Resources in Spanish, French, and German comprise 7-8 percent of the archive. Archival sources comprise a significant share of the collection. Documents appear as scanned images with uncorrected ASCII files in the background to permit full-text searching.

We will discuss how we constructed the database, which is drawn from more than 250 archives and libraries around the world with the editorial support of more than 130 international scholars. We'll describe how the archive became a preservation project for rare surviving documents and also discuss our work with numerous NGOs and activists as we selected post-1990 documents. In addition, we will explore various tools that access these materials, taking advantage of the rich indexing that has been an integral part of constructing the database. The presentation will show how the database makes possible new analysis and interpretations of women's international activism.

 
Mar 23rd, 2:30 PM Mar 23rd, 3:45 PM

Women and Social Movements, International: A New Online Resource for Transnational Women’s History

We propose a slide presentation and talk by Kitty Sklar with Tom Dublin participating at various points in the discussion. After editing Women and Social Movements in the United States for a decade, we turned to the international dimensions of women's activism. Over four years we brought together 4,600 documents totaling 150,000 pages, covering the period since 1840. This online archive includes virtually all proceedings of conferences of women's international organizations since 1880, about 500 in all. We published the first release of the database with Alexander Street Press in January 2011 and expect the complete posting sources by March 2013.

The database draws on diverse documents offering broad temporal and geographic coverage of women's organized internationalism. Resources include materials from Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and the Pacific. Resources in Spanish, French, and German comprise 7-8 percent of the archive. Archival sources comprise a significant share of the collection. Documents appear as scanned images with uncorrected ASCII files in the background to permit full-text searching.

We will discuss how we constructed the database, which is drawn from more than 250 archives and libraries around the world with the editorial support of more than 130 international scholars. We'll describe how the archive became a preservation project for rare surviving documents and also discuss our work with numerous NGOs and activists as we selected post-1990 documents. In addition, we will explore various tools that access these materials, taking advantage of the rich indexing that has been an integral part of constructing the database. The presentation will show how the database makes possible new analysis and interpretations of women's international activism.