Building In Her Own Right: White Paper for National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (Grant #PW-264121-19)

Abstract

The Philadelphia Area Consortium of Special Collections Libraries (PACSCL) received a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Humanities Collections and Reference Resources (HCRR) Implementation grant to digitize thirty linear feet of materials from thirty-one collections in twelve of its member institutions and two additional repositories documenting the history of women’s civil rights and expose that and additional content on the web. The two-year grant, beginning in May 2019, was designed to ensure that a significant portion of the material would be online in the months surrounding the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth amendment: August 18, 2020. Additionally, collection-level records for any material not digitized by that time served as signposts for researchers seeking more timely access. That project built on the successes of a one-year NEH Foundations grant (July 2016-June 2017), designed to identify and disseminate information about collections in Philadelphia-area archives documenting women working for their own and other’s rights, 1820-1920. The content, provided on a pilot website (http://inherownright.org/), served as a resource for students and teachers as the nation began to look to the 100th anniversary of woman suffrage in 2020. PACSCL requested additional NEH funding to digitize more content from its member institutions and other institutions as well as to support outreach to find, digitize, and describe additional collections, particularly those documenting underrepresented populations. In Her Own Right also expanded its user audiences from high school students and undergraduates to include graduate students and scholars, by enhancing the website to include additional tools and resources supporting research use. This enabled the team to realize more fully an original core concept of the project: to provide both “retail” access (mediated content with contextualizing supporting materials) and “wholesale” access (unmediated raw material—both digitized content and metadata–for a range of future research and digital scholarship projects). The core of project work was digitizing and describing manuscript and some printed materials, held in area institutions, irrespective of the geographic focus of the collection itself. The digitized material is served up through a robust web presence that provides access to well-described digital items; the capacity to download and manipulate the descriptive data to generate new scholarly products; and other resources that will serve students and scholars studying not only women’s work leading up to the 1920 vote for woman suffrage, but countless other topics as well. The long narrative of women making incremental progress toward equality and opportunity continues to be relevant. To extend project work to document the conversations across race and class that the team began to reflect on during the Foundations grant, the Implementation proposal also budgeted time and staff to find, digitize, and describe additional collections documenting underrepresented populations. Initial research identified a number of potentially rich collections for inclusion that illuminated a broad range of activism among many groups of women. These included some groups that are underrepresented in the traditional historical narrative of women’s campaign for voting and other civil rights, but the project team also hoped to find even more collections relating to these underrepresented populations and recognized that doing so would require significant outreach beyond PACSCL members. Using PACSCL’s tested methodology from two Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Hidden Collections grants1 and PACSCL institution staff members trained in its process, the project team worked with small repositories in the area that lacked access tools or staff to identify “hidden voices.” This white paper, while highlighting the NEH Implementation phase of the project, also looks across 2016 to 2021, and outlines successes, challenges, learnings, and opportunities for continued project growth.