Library News

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.