If We Build it, Will They Come? Challenges and Opportunities in Digitizing the Iowa Women’s Archives
Speaker Bio
Kären M. Mason is Curator of the Iowa Women's Archives, University of Iowa Libraries, a position she has held since the archives' founding in 1992. She earned degrees in history from Bryn Mawr College, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Michigan, where her dissertation focused on US women's history. Mason's involvement with women's history dates to the 1970s, when she worked on the Women's History Sources survey at the University of Minnesota and co-authored a Women's History Tour of the Twin Cities (1982). She is the author of a number of articles on women's archives and women's history.
Jen Wolfe is a Digital Scholarship Librarian at the University of Iowa Libraries, where she has coordinated projects such as the Iowa Women's Archives Digital Collection and the DIY History crowdsourcing site. Prior to her work at Iowa, she was a Digital Collections Cataloger at the Experience Music Project, assisting with such museum initiatives as the Riot Grrrl Retrospective oral history project. Wolfe has written and presented on women's scrapbooks, career novels, romance comics, fanzines, and Nancy Drew author Mildred Wirt Benson.
Abstract
Since its founding in 1992, the Iowa Women's Archives (IWA) in the University of Iowa Libraries has gathered documents, photographs, scrapbooks, and audiovisual material that illuminate the lives of Iowa women at home and abroad. The digital world has brought the archival world into the open, revealing collections once known only to persistent researchers. Guides to all IWA collections are now available at the click of a mouse, while digitized selections from our holdings are continuously added to the Iowa Digital Library, transforming the way the public interacts with our documents.
This session will explore the opportunities and limitations of the digital world by presenting lessons learned from the IWA's digital initiatives, in particular its Women's Suffrage in Iowa, Mujeres Latinas, UI Physical Education for Women, and African American Women at the University of Iowa digital collections and its DIY History crowdsourcing site that allows the public to transcribe, comment on, and tag digital collections. We will address the questions: How can we engage millennial students through participatory archives? How can digital collections complement and encourage use of more extensive archival collections? Since we can't digitize everything, how should we select for digitization?
If We Build it, Will They Come? Challenges and Opportunities in Digitizing the Iowa Women’s Archives
Since its founding in 1992, the Iowa Women's Archives (IWA) in the University of Iowa Libraries has gathered documents, photographs, scrapbooks, and audiovisual material that illuminate the lives of Iowa women at home and abroad. The digital world has brought the archival world into the open, revealing collections once known only to persistent researchers. Guides to all IWA collections are now available at the click of a mouse, while digitized selections from our holdings are continuously added to the Iowa Digital Library, transforming the way the public interacts with our documents.
This session will explore the opportunities and limitations of the digital world by presenting lessons learned from the IWA's digital initiatives, in particular its Women's Suffrage in Iowa, Mujeres Latinas, UI Physical Education for Women, and African American Women at the University of Iowa digital collections and its DIY History crowdsourcing site that allows the public to transcribe, comment on, and tag digital collections. We will address the questions: How can we engage millennial students through participatory archives? How can digital collections complement and encourage use of more extensive archival collections? Since we can't digitize everything, how should we select for digitization?