writing_womans_lives_symposium_paper_book_v2

famous, published works, and individual items. There are still huge amounts of resources in paper, of
course; photographs, or other images; art works; memorabilia such as political buttons and
demonstration signs; sound and video recordings; and of course born‐digital resources. Although we
still collect resources about women around the world, we also work on the assumption that it is
important for a collection to remain within its country of origin. We have made exceptions to this
policy in cases of war and the preservation of records, but only at the request of the creators of these
resources. Despite the Internet, many resources are not digitized nor easily accessed in the original.
Women are less likely to have resources to travel far to see original records. Questions do rise as to
where the records of internationalists or international organizations should reside. If a women’s
organization meets or works in many different locations‐where should those records be stored?
While the Internet might provide temporary access to those records beyond a particular nation state,
that access might be restricted at a future date by a particular government, service provider, or other
type of intervention due to economic or political shifts.
Recently questions have arisen amongst historians and archivists alike about the definition of the
archives itself. Some have questioned whether archives need to be in one physical location, within a
library for example. Others have named any set of records about women’s lives, to be an archive. I
suggest that any archives or set of collected records still needs to be preserved for posterity and
needs to be accessible to a broad audience. An example in point from my own institution‐we
recently acquired a set of papers from peace activist Jessie Wallace Hughan‐an internationalist and
the founder of the socialist pacifist group, the War Resisters League. Until last year these papers,
photographs, and other materials were in the hands of the family and a scholar planning a biography
of Hughan. Were Hughan’s papers an “archive” while still in private hands, with many barriers to
their long‐term preservation and access? I would propose that we, scholars and the general public
alike must be able to access these resources to learn about women’s lives and that this is an essential
component of any historical archives.
Access to archival material is complicated and extends far beyond the ability to see and touch an
original historical record. But even this physicality of access requires resources, time, and ability to
travel to an institution or storage location; language education and acquisition, perhaps some sort of
permission for entrance (scholarly status, residency, membership in a political, religious, or other
body, financial payment); an environment in which to properly use the historical records‐including
machinery to see audio visual items, for example. Digitization of historical records might overcome
some of these concerns, but even this type of access requires that someone has collected and
preserved the resources in the first place. And of course digital files have their own set of
environmental requirements: some sort of electronic, rechargeable device; internet delivery system;
and software applications to read the files.
Under even the best of physical circumstances, there are additional components to access.
Records and resources need to be organized in some way, as raw data or a set of disparate
documents are rarely useful. Perhaps even more importantly, the creation of metadata access points
such as descriptions of the records, are necessary for researchers to discover the existence of the
records themselves. More and more this metadata is available via the internet, but much is still
located within local organizations, libraries and archives, older paper guides, books, and other
sources, themselves sometimes difficult to locate. How does this all relate to women’s history
sources? In most cases, metadata is still a creation of human judgment, deciding on which access
points or metadata might best describe a set of records or historical resources. If the human
creators do not believe that the information about women in a set of records is a priority, then there
maybe few metadata access points created pointing to the information on women. A brief example:
the Peace Collection has the records of an internationally minded peace organization, celebrating its
100 th anniversary next year, the Fellowship of Reconciliation (FOR). There are hundreds of thousands
of pages of historical documents, and thousands other types of records in this collection. Women, as
well as men have been members and leaders of the FOR since its founding in 1915. We have recently
received the FOR records about the organization’s efforts in Eastern Europe during the wars of the
1990s. The FOR raised money to provide scholarships for Bosnian high school students to leave their
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