Library News

Lecture by Dr. N. Peggy Burke, CLAS Alumni Fellow 2009, sponsored by the Dept. of Health & Sport Studies and the Iowa Women’s Archives.   A reception will follow the lecture.

Friday, September 11
3:30 – 5 p.m.
Pomerantz Career Center, Auditorium C20 

N. Peggy Burke (Ph.D. ‘65, Physical Education) has spent a life in service to the principles of women’s and human rights, civic engagement, and social consciousness that defined her academic career. She served on the CLAS faculty for more than 30 years, and since 1957 has been actively involved in the promotion of women in sport, receiving numerous honors for these efforts.

Her papers are held by the Iowa Women’s Archives: http://sdrc.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa/findingaids/html/BurkePeggy.htm

The Iowa Women’s Archives at The University of Iowa Libraries has been nominated for an Iowa Women’s Foundation 2009 50% Solution Award in the nonprofit category.

Vote Here!

The 50% Solution Awards began in 2006 as a way to recognize and reinforce positive contributions made to open doors and advance Iowa women and girls. Previous award winners have been honored for going above and beyond to offer professional development for women, enhanced leadership opportunities in fields where women are traditionally underrepresented and for changing the social framework in which we see women’s roles defined.

Iowa Women’s Foundation will hold a public vote September 1 – 15 for nominees. To support the Iowa Women’s Archives, please logon to www.iawf.org and cast your vote.

The State Historical Society of Iowa’s popular “History for Lunch” lecture series continues this month with Janet Weaver, assistant curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa.

History for Lunch will be at noon Wednesday, March 25, 2009, at SHSI’s Centennial Building, 402 Iowa Avenue (Iowa and Gilbert streets) in Iowa City. The lecture is free and the public is encouraged to bring a brown bag lunch. Call 319-335-3911 for more information.

Weaver’s discussion, “Of Buttons and Barrios: Iowa Women Activists for Labor and Civil Rights, 1910-1960,” focuses on the agency of Eastern Iowa women in the long struggle for social and economic justice that preceded landmark legislative gains of the 20th century.

“Whether button workers in Muscatine or factory workers who lived in Mexican barrios in the Quad Cities, the activism of working-class Iowa women of diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds challenges us to reconsider our understanding of early to mid-century Iowa history,” Weaver said.

Weaver earned a master’s degree in modern history at St. Andrews University in Scotland and is the author of a forthcoming article in the Summer 2009 issue of “Annals of Iowa” entitled, “From Barrio to ‘¡Boicoteo!’: The Emergence of Mexican American Activism in Davenport, Iowa, 1917-1970.”

The State Historical Society of Iowa is a division of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs, and is a trustee of Iowa’s historical legacy and an advocate for understanding Iowa’s past. It identifies, records, collects, preserves, manages and provides access to Iowa’s historical resources. Its dual mission of preservation and education serves Iowans of all ages, conducts and stimulates research, disseminates information, and encourages and supports historical preservation and education efforts of others throughout the state. Visit www.iowahistory.org or call 515-281-5111 for more information.

The Herstory Subcommittee of the Council on the Status of Women & the Iowa Women’s Archives present

A Women’s History Month Reception
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
5 p.m. – 6 p.m.
Program begins at 5:15, refreshments served.

Join us in celebration with guest speaker(s) Prof. Linda Kerber and Prof. Leslie Schwalm in the Iowa Women’s Archives (3rd floor, UI Main Library).

Almost 1000 historic photographs of University women’s physical education classes – from archery and synchronized swimming to basketball and dance – are now publicly available online. In celebration of Women’s History Month, the University of Iowa Libraries has released the UI Department of Physical Education for Women digital collection: http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/wpe .

The photographs, spanning almost 100 years (1906-2004), are part of a larger manuscript collection that documents the rise of women’s athletics at Iowa from the one-member Department of Physical Culture and Athletics to the dawn of women’s intercollegiate sports. The Department of Physical Education for Women at the University of Iowa was a pioneer in the development of graduate study and professional training as well as athletic opportunities for women.

“These photographs offer a fabulous window into women’s sport—and campus life—over the past century.  They’re very appealing, from the expected team portraits and sports action shots to the more surprising images of laboratory experiments, rifle enthusiasts, and slumber parties,” says Kären Mason, Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives. “The digital collection provides easy access to these photos, and I hope it will inspire people to explore the equally fascinating records of the Department of PE for Women that are available in the archives.”

Intercollegiate athletics for women at The University of Iowa originated in the Department of Physical Education for Women in the late 1960s and early 1970s and maintained that association until 2000.  This relationship stemmed from the philosophy of the women physical educators and the value they placed on education and women-centered and -controlled sport.

“Those two key, related notions are still at the heart of the current Department of Health and Sport Studies: that sport and physical activity should be part of a liberal arts education and that they can contribute greatly to both individual well-being and the social good,” says Catriona Parratt, Associate Professor in the Department of Health & Sport Studies. “We are delighted that the Iowa Women’s Archives digital photographic collection will make it easier for many more people to appreciate this aspect of the University’s mission.”

This historic image collection is the latest edition to the Iowa Digital Library — http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu — which contains more than 225,000 digital objects, including photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents from libraries and archives at the UI and their partnering institutions as well as faculty research collections.

To explore the vast digital holdings from the Iowa Women’s Archives, a portal that allows users to browse by subject, time period or artifact type is available online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa . It will be continually updated with new items drawn from the IWA’s 1100 manuscript collections, which have provided valuable primary source materials for books, articles, theses and class projects on women’s history.

For more information about the collection, contact Kären Mason, Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives, at 335-5068.

Louise Rosenfield Noun, social activist, art collector, author, philanthropist and co-founder of the Iowa Women’s Archives, was born in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1908. Noun became widely recognized for her leadership and commitment to a number of organizations and causes.

Please join us in a celebration of her life with cake and conversation.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008
4:00 – 5:30 p.m.
Iowa Women’s Archives
Third Floor, Main Library

She served as president of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union and the Des Moines chapters of the League of Women Voters and the National Organization for Women. Noun established the Chrysalis Foundation in 1989 to provide financial assistance to Iowa women. She wrote several books, including Strong-Minded Women: The Emergence of the Woman-Suffrage Movement in Iowa; More Strong-Minded Women: Iowa Feminists Tell Their Stories; Iowa Women in the WPA; Journey to Autonomy: A Memoir; and Leader and Pariah: Annie Savery and the Campaign for Women’s Rights in Iowa, 1868-1891.

Louise Noun realized a long-term goal in 1992 with the establishment of the Louise Noun-Mary Louise Smith Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa Libraries. The Iowa Women’s Archives, which opened in October 1992, is devoted to preserving the history of women by acquiring and making available primary source material that documents the lives of Iowa women.  

Learn more about Louise Noun through the IWA Founder’s digital collection.

As women’s history month comes to a close, the Iowa Women’s Archives goes online. To mark the occasion and unveil the digital collection, the University of Iowa Libraries will celebrate with a reception on Wednesday, March 26th from 12 – 1 p.m. in the North Exhibition Hall of the Main Library.

Through the new digital collection, students and other researchers can now discover stories of remarkable Iowa women from the comfort of home. They can learn about civil rights activism through Fort Madison NAACP newsletters Virginia Harper typed in the 1960s. The photograph collection of Estefanía Rodriguez reveals life in Holy City, an early 20th century Mexican barrio in Bettendorf. Audio clips and newspaper columns of radio homemaker Evelyn Birkby capture rural life in southwest Iowa at mid-century.

This academic year marks the 15th anniversary of the Iowa Women’s Archives, which was founded by Louise Noun and Mary Louise Smith. Two new online resources celebrate their vision: the IWA Founders Collection http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/founders and the IWA Timeline http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa/timeline. The Founders collection includes a scrapbook that chronicles Smith’s early involvement in politics, which culminated in her appointment as chair of the Republican National Committee in 1974. Louise Noun’s scrapbooks document many aspects of her activism, including her leadership of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union.

These materials are part of the Iowa Women’s Archives Digital Collections, a new portal that provides access to the 1400 IWA items in the Iowa Digital Library. The site, which allows users to browse by subject, time period or document type, is available online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/iwa . It will be regularly updated with new items drawn from the IWA’s 1100 manuscript collections, which have provided valuable primary source materials for books, articles, theses and class projects.

“Not everyone can visit the Archives in person. The online collections are a great way to open the archives to a much broader audience, like K-12 students across the state and beyond our borders,” says Kären Mason, Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives. “It’s so cool that a girl in Algona can turn on her computer and find a newspaper clipping about about the Des Moines women who supported Shirley Chisholm’s presidential campaign in 1972.”

The Founders and IWA collections are the latest additions to the Iowa Digital Library — http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu — which contains more than 98,000 digital objects, including photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents from libraries and archives at the UI and their partnering institutions. The Iowa Digital Library also includes faculty research collections and bibliographic tools.

“The Iowa Women’s Archives is a gem–not only for researchers, who can conduct research in a wide range of primary sources, including collections that represent the experiences of African American and Latina Iowans–but also for teachers,” says Dr. Leslie Schwalm, Associate Professor of History. “Students in my American history and women’s history courses have found the Iowa Women’s Archives a wonderful gateway to the past and to the work of the historian. My undergraduate history majors gain a semester’s worth of learning in an hour spent at the Iowa Women’s Archives: they get to touch and read the letters and diaries and photographs that capture the American past. There is an excitement of discovery and of connection to the past that no textbook or lecture can convey. The Iowa Women’s Archives is one of my most valuable resources as a teacher at the University of Iowa.”

Janet Weaver, Assistant Curator of the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA), will receive an award from LULAC (League of United Latin American Citizens), Council 10, Davenport, for her oustanding service to the Council. The ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 16th.

Janet has built strong relationships in the Quad Cities Latino community through her dedicated and impressive work for the Mujeres Latinas project. She has interviewed many Latinas and Latinos in the Quad Cities, arranged to scan historic photos in the aging LULAC Hall exhibit and assisted Kristin Baum, Assistant Conservator, in remounting the exhibit, acquired the records of LULAC Council 10 for the IWA, and acquired the papers of a number of people who have been associated with LULAC Council 10. Many photos from LULAC Council 10 and from related individuals are in the Mujeres Latinas Collection of the Iowa Digital Library.

Adah Hyde Johnson (Class of 1912) described her graduation from The University of Iowa as “one of the great dreams” of her father, a successful businessman who had grown up under slavery. Helping to integrate Currier Hall in 1946 was the first step of Virginia Harper’s (Class of 1948) lifelong career as a civil rights activist. The election of Dora Martin Berry (Class of 1957, pictured on the left from the Saturday Evening Post) as the UI’s campus queen of 1955 attracted national press coverage as an example of racial tolerance, yet she was barred from carrying out the traditional honors and duties of her title.

The stories of these women and many others are featured in a new digital collection from the UI Libraries: African American Women Students at The University of Iowa, 1910-1960, available online at http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu/aaws

This collection features 150 digitized artifacts, including photographs, scrapbooks, correspondence, and oral history audio clips, drawn from the holdings of the Iowa Women’s Archives, The University of Iowa Archives, the African American Historical Museum and Cultural Center of Iowa, and the State Historical Society of Iowa. The project was led by Shawn Averkamp, a Fellow in the School of Library and Information Science’s Digital Libraries Program, and coordinated by the UI’s Digital Library Services department.

“I was most impressed by the African American Women’s archive website,” says Courtney Parker, Recruitment Chair of the Black Student Union. “The collection of data in one convenient place about the contributions of black women to Iowa’s rich history is intriguing and moving. I truly appreciate the hard work that goes into such projects, as it justifiably honors and commemorates the everyday black women, college-age women in America such as myself, who have (until now) anonymously participated in the gratifying struggle of leaving their mark in the history books. It makes me proud to look upon the faces of and read the stories about women who have made a difference for women like me.”

The goal of the project was to compile and increase access to primary source materials from a variety of archival collections, thereby helping to piece together the history of African American students at the UI. This history has been under-documented since African Americans were often excluded from such mainstream student publications as the yearbook and The Daily Iowan.

“The collective experience of African American women students at UI is a rich one that must be preserved so that future generations will remember the struggles and joys of those times,” said David McCartney, University Archivist. “The online collection helps us understand that experience more deeply and from a variety of individual perspectives.”

The collection is the latest addition to the Iowa Digital Library — http://digital.lib.uiowa.edu – which contains more than 95,000 digital objects (photographs, maps, sound recordings and documents) from libraries and archives at UI and their partnering institutions. The Iowa Digital Library also includes faculty research collections and bibliographic tools.

The Iowa Women’s Archives oral history project, Mujeres Latinas has been recognized with the UI President’s Award for State Outreach and Public Engagement.

The annual award honors those who demonstrate exemplary outreach to the State of Iowa and the public in general. The $1,000 awards are given in four categories: faculty, staff, student and group/organization.

“Giving back and providing valuable service to our community, state, nation and world are central to our mission and important responsibilities to Iowa’s citizens who have invested their resources and their trust in the University of Iowa for 160 years,” UI Interim President Gary Fethke said. “These awardees represent the remarkable outreach that the UI community performs, and I commend them on the talent and generosity with which they have engaged themselves with the public.”

The Mujeres Latinas Project (a group/organization recipient) has achieved notable success in documenting the largely unknown stories of Latina women in Iowa through oral histories and other collections. The Iowa Women’s Archives established the project, under the oversight of IWA Curator Kären Mason, to collect and preserve information that documents the lives of Latinas and their families and their contributions to Iowa history. Between 2005 and 2007, the project has conducted 91 oral history interviews throughout Iowa and has collected letters, photographs, family records, organizational records, and newspaper articles that have been organized, cataloged, preserved, and made available to students, scholars and the public.

Pictured above is the Iowa Women’s Archives staff for the Mujeres Latinas project, Rachel Garza Carreon, Janet Weaver and Kären Mason.

The University of Iowa Libraries is celebrating Women’s History Month by highlighting archival collections about rural women and civil rights activists from the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA). A selection of digitized photographs, correspondence, audio recordings and other artifacts documenting the lives of Iowa women is currently featured on the University’s Iowa Digital Library .

In addition to the online collections, two public events are scheduled in March to celebrate the history of women in Iowa. The Mujeres Latinas Project will be featured during a brown bag lunch “Latinas and the Emergence of a Grassroots Civil Rights Movement in Iowa” on Tuesday, March 27 at 12 p.m. in the Main Library as part of the campus-wide Latinos in Action Week: Honoring Cesar Chavez.

An event highlighting the African American Women in Iowa collections will be Wednesday, March 28 at 7 p.m. in the Afro American Cultural Center at 303 Melrose Avenue (this event has been rescheduled from March 20).

“Every month is a celebration of women’s history in the Iowa Women’s Archives,” says Kären Mason, Curator of IWA. “We’re happy to take part in the celebration of Women’s History Month, which gives us a chance to highlight some of the many exceptional women who have changed the course of Iowa history in ways large and small.”

The Iowa Digital Library, an online repository of the University’s locally created digital collections, is featuring the following digitized selections from IWA in honor of Women’s History Month:

Evelyn Birkby Collection of Radio Homemaker Materials
Wife, mother, homemaker, newspaper columnist, and radio personality, Birkby is a journalist with a passion for rural history.

Noble Photograph Collection
Mary Noble, a librarian at the University for over three decades, has collected thousands of historic photographs, postcards, glass plate negatives and other images of and by Iowa women.

Virginia Harper Papers
As a student at the University of Iowa, Harper helped integrate Currier residence hall in 1946; after graduation, she went on to become president of her local branch of the NAACP.

Shirley Sandage Papers
Activist Sandage managed a variety of social programs to help migrant farm workers, impoverished children, and people with disabilities.