Women Working, 1870 – 1930, Harvard University
On April 22, 2005, 57 librarians attended WSIG's Spring program at Harvard University. Held at the Gutman Conference Center, the program had two components: an overview of the “Women Working, 1870-1930” Open Collections project, and a tour of the newly renovated Schlesinger Library.
The following is a summary of the program's content. It has been augmented with information on the brochure “Harvard University Library Open Collections Program” and the Harvard University Library Open Collections Program: Final Report http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/report/final/ .
Thomas J. Michalak, Director of the Open Collections Program, Christine M. Madsen, Manager of the Open Collections Program, and Megan Hurst, Outreach and Evaluation Coordinator, Open Collections Program, were main presenters. Mr. Michalak spoke first, providing background on the Open Collections Program and Women Working project.
The Open Collections Program (OCP)
The Open Collections Program (OCP) was established in 2002 with support from the Hewlett Foundation, Lisbet Rausing (Harvard PhD '93) and Peter Baldwin (Harvard PhD'86). The goal of OCP is to increase the availability and use of historical resources from Harvard's libraries, museums, and archives for teaching, learning, and research. Potential audiences include both Harvard students and the general public, with a particular emphasis on school teachers. OCP has two mandates: 1) to create comprehensive, subject-based digital collections that will benefit teaching, learning, and research at all levels, and 2) to facilitate multi-institutional sharing and use of high-quality digital resources which are faithful to original documents.
OCP seeks to engage and activate global use of its collections. It is committed to preserving its digital resources and to soliciting feedback from scholars, students, and faculty at a variety of institutions. OCP provides a single, coherent access to materials that have traditionally been dispersed across Harvard. Access to digitized materials is made possible by browsing the entire collection by topic; browsing portions of the collection within the context of a person, organization, or event; searching for a term or phrase in the full text of the digitized books; and locating digitized materials by searching library catalogs.
Women Working, 1870- 1930
The Women Working project explores women's roles in the U.S. economy between the Civil War and the Great Depression. Working conditions, conditions in the home and workplace, costs of living, recreation, health and hygiene, conduct of life, policies and regulations governing the workplace, and social issues are among the topics covered.
Mr. Michalak described the selection process for the Women Working project. Materials came from Schlesinger Library, Baker Library, Countway Library, Widener Library, Harvard Depository /Harvard University Library, Harvard Law School Library, Littauer Library, Loeb Design Library, Gutman Library, and the Fogg Art Museum. Materials were selected for their broad appeal for teaching. They encompass a wide range of materials: books, pamphlets, and manuscripts. Items selected are not too general or too specific in subject scope. Selected items complement items in other institutions' digitized collections.
Mr. Michalak elaborated on the methodology for identifying and selecting materials. OCP built relationships with faculty, bibliographers, and collection curators across Harvard to ensure the development of a well-rounded collection. The Faculty Advisory Committee and Content Committee aided the selection process.
Detailed searches were done of the Harvard Catalogs Hollis and Oasis. Complete shelf browsings were done for Schlesinger, Baker, and Widener libraries. A complete review was conducted of the Widener and Baker libraries pamphlet collections. The following special collections were also scrutinized: Baker Library's trade catalog collection, the Fogg Museum's Social Museum photograph collection, and the Schlesinger Library's manuscript collection. In addition, key bibliographies by women's historians like Nancy Cott and Alice Kessler-Harris were studied. In locating manuscripts, selectors perused Finding Aids and identified 64 possible collections of interest. Next, selectors met with the Faculty Advisory Committee, Content Committee and Schlesinger Director Nancy Cott to make final selections.
There were editorial guidelines for inclusion or exclusion, in addition to content guidelines. There were physical and structural guidelines to facilitate digitization. One reformatting consideration, for example, was: if pages were digitized, would images be presentable and/or navigable? Were there grey scale images that required special imaging techniques?
If an item was available in other institutions' digital libraries, OCP did not duplicate it, but made a link to it from the collection. However, some items were duplicated if they were only available from commercial sites.
Durable urls were made for links to external collections. These included the HEARTH collection at Cornell ( http://hearth.library.cornell.edu/ ); American Memory at the Library of Congress (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/); Making of America at the University of Michigan http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/moagrp/ ); and Wright American Fiction at Indiana University ( http://www.letrs.indiana.edu/web/w/wright2/ ). Mr. Michalak asserted that by integrating other collections into Women Working, this would become a destination portal on women's work history.
As of February 28, 2005, The Women Working Collection included 2605 books and pamphlets, and 1125 photographs (292 from the Baker Collections and 833 from the Social Museum Collection at the Fogg). New in 2005 are pre-1870 imprints and conduct of life books and pamphlets, 41 trade catalogs, 15 issues of women's magazines Ladies Home Journals, the Lowell Offering , and New England Offering 1840 –1850. Also included were manuscripts from the New England Female Medical College Scrapbook; the James Chadwick Medical Education and Society Membership of Women; and the Department of the Interior's “Among the Winnebagos and Nez Perce Indians.”
Production and Technical Aspects
Christine Madsen, Project Manager, spoke about production issues, and technical aspects of digitization. The web site was designed to provide several ways to access the collection: through a topic map; through portions of the collection via contextual pages (people, organizations, dates and events); by type of material; easy access to “new additions,” and basic search functions of both the records and full-text documents.
The Women Working site uses HOLLIS as the primary searching and indexing tool. The staff of OCP devised a gateway to make searching easier for people from outside Harvard. Every effort has been made to recreate faithful digital reproductions of monographs and serials. All technical decisions were grounded the decision not to bring harm to primary sources. Materials were first microfilmed, then digitized. Numerous problems with reproducing color and grey scale documents were resolved. The web sites provides key navigation points – indexes, tables of contents, and three levels of navigation: simple, complex, and custom. Three kinds of imaging combinations: bi-tonal, combination, and color. Production begins with enhancing the cataloging record, then contributing bibliographic access to resources nationally.
Working Women staff worked with the digital library infrastructure in place at Harvard. This included page delivery service, digital resources service, and name resolution service.
Outreach and Evaluation
Megan Hurst, Outreach and Evaluation Coordinator, described marketing for Women Working. Target audiences include: the Internet, libraries/librarians, educators, researchers, the general public, and students. An illustration of the relationship among these groups is found at: http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/report/final/ .
Distribution channels for marketing the project are: libraries (all levels), educators (professional organizations, conferences, direct mail, and listservs), and the Internet (search engines, blogs, and reference aggregator sites).
Some of the marketing activities to date include: creation of a Women Working brochure; appearances at ALA Midwinter in Boston and the Dynamic Women in Business Conference at Harvard Business School; mailings to selected librarians, and creation of a Women Working 1887 & 2005 Calendar for download and self-printing. http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/report/final/pages_7.html provides more information on these efforts.
Since December 2004, visits to the site have tripled. For the week of February 13, 2005, there were 8,092 visits. Repeat visitors doubled between December 2004 and February 2005.
Vendor software (NetIQ's " WebTrends " product) was implemented early in the project to track web site traffic and use. This software has been invaluable for providing statistics on:
For the month of February 2005:
To see the complete digital circulation statistics for the month of February, 2005, please see http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/report/final/pages_7.html .
Future Projects
The next OCP project will be “Emigration and Immigration, 1789 to the Great Depression.” There will be a particular emphasis on the northeast. It is anticipated that this resource will be approximately the same size as Women Working. Among the content will be law and legislation, government, public policies, diaries, letters, recollections, statistics, and biographies. It will include books, pamphlets, images, and documents from settlement houses.
Schlesinger Library Tour
Following the Women Working presentation, participants toured the newly renovated Schlesinger Library. There were three groups of tours. Participants saw behind the scenes areas like technical services, the vault, and stacks. Newly renovated public areas provide more comfortable seating and study areas. Stacks are now closed, with many items stored off-site. For this reason, visitors are encouraged to call ahead to discuss availability of materials. During the academic year, the library is open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday & Friday: 9:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., and most Wednesdays until 9:30 a.m. to 8:00 p.m.
See http://www.radcliffe.edu/schles/ for more information on the library.