The Women's Studies Interest Group held one program during the 2000-2001 fiscal year and planned a program for the fall of 2001. We also put up a web page documenting the history of the group since its founding in 1992.
The URL for the Women's Studies Interest Group web page is: http://www.acrlnec.org/sigs/wsig/wsig.shtml. It includes annual reports of activities, a detailed report of the March 2, 2001 program, an announcement for our upcoming program, and information on how to join the WSIG e-mail distribution list.
Brown University Women Writers Project, March 2, 2001.
Some twenty hearty souls from Maine, Massachusetts, Connecticut and Rhode Island braved cold weather, light snow, and a slippery walk up Brown University's College Street hill to attend the Women's Studies Interest Group winter program, "Bringing early women's writing to the modern field of vision: the Brown University Women Writers Project" at the Rockefeller Library on March 2, 2001.
The Women Writers Project is a research organization devoted to making early women's writing available for teaching and research. It has produced Women Writers Online, a collection of 200 English texts by women writers before 1830, with an interdisciplinary range of subjects and genres. Julia Flanders (WWP Director) began the program with a discussion of the background of the WWP. The WWP was founded in the mid-1980s as a reclamation project to bring early women's writings out of obscurity and into classroom use. At the same time they wanted to use the newly emerging digital technology to help achieve this goal and to increase access and usability to rare materials and materials difficult to access.
Dominique Coulombe and Ann Caldwell, catalogers, offered the perspectives and contributions of librarians to the WWP. Julia Flanders then described a survey sent to scholars who had used WWP texts in the past. Elizabeth Hageman, Chair of the Advisory Board of the WWP, and Professor at the University of New Hampshire, gave a presentation on how the WWP got started. Professor Hageman also described some of the ways in which she and her colleagues use the WWO, and specifically the 100 texts in the Renaissance Women Online (RWO) subset.
The WWP was funded for its first ten years by the NEH, and a Mellon Foundation grant funded the RWO for three years. Both organizations are interested in text reclamation projects. Now, with cost-sharing, the WWP is about to break even. They will be writing new grants to fund the coding of new texts. There are some 10,000 prospective texts. The project will continue as long as it is useful. There are other groups doing similar women's e-text projects, and there is dialogue with these organizations. Right now, the WWP is the only one on a paid subscription basis. They are exploring ways in which they might link to these secondary materials. In the future there may be some sort of mediated interface. It may be a question of time and money.
Future Plans:
Our next program will be held on September 28, 2001 at Harvard's Baker Library. It will concern Baker Library's survey to identify the records on women's history in its business manuscript collections: Unheard Voices: American Women in the Emerging Industrial and Business Age . Beyond that, we are considering another visit to the Maine Women Writers' Collection, which we last visited in June 1997. Cally Gurley, Archivist of the Maine Women Writers Collection, Westbrook College Campus, University of New England, Portland, ME, announced that in June 2002, they will be hosting a conference on communities of women. We look forward to paying a return visit, perhaps in conjunction with the 2002 conference.
Sarah Mitchell, Co-chair
Chris Smith, Co-chair