This week I continued looking through the collections in the Iowa Women's Archives.  I looked at several more interesting collections including (descriptions adapted from the IWA site):

Jessie Field Shambaugh: Teacher in SW Iowa, called the "Mother of 4-H".

Elvira Platt: Teacher and abolitionist who assisted fleeing slaves on the Underground Railroad while living in Fremont County, Iowa. Taught school to Pawnee children in Pennsylvania and Nebraska.  (Many of Platt's papers are kept in other archives some documents in IWA are copies, so issues arise with copyright.)

Lucy White: Late 19th century schoolteacher from central Iowa. 

Pearl McGill: Early twentieth century labor activist, IWW member, and Buffalo school teacher

Marian Rees: Emmy Award-winning television producer

I also began thinking about whether I ought to try and scan entire collections left-to-right or if I should simply pull out the most interesting items from each collection.  There's no easy answer for this question.  The archivists tell me that collections can contain items with sensitive information, or that are simply not very interesting.  In addition, when archives contain published materials or copies of originals that are held in another institution, copyright issues arise.  The bottom line is that judgement must be exercised and not all items can be put on the Internet.  However, from a digitization standpoint, it may be more useful for researchers that can't physically visit the archives, to be able to see all documents online.  When an entire collection is not scanned, how can digitizers point out the missing pieces?  It's difficult to indicate the scope of the digitized collection in general (have entire boxes, series, or folders been digitized; if so, which ones?), and even more difficult to indicate item level pieces that have been left out.  This is due in part to the fact that, for practical reasons, archivists don't do item level description in the finding aids, and largely because hyperlinks are missing between the Iowa Digital Library and the Iowa Women's Archives finding aids.     

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This week I looked through the finding aids for the Rural Women's Collections in IWA online.  On paper, I mapped the counties where the different rural women lived in Iowa. 

I also started thinking about how the final interface mapping feature may work.  It would be interesting if we could mine the digitized archives for place names and link the references to a map.  The major barrier to this is that all of the documents would need to be transcribed or OCR'd.  I also created a customized search engine with Google that only searches the rural women's finding aids.  This may help us in the process of finding interesting collections or place names. 

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Getting started on Semester 3 Project: This week I had an orientation for Digital Library Services (DLS) to learn about their procedures and expectations, and got a chance to meet the staff.  After that, Anne Shelley, my mentor for the semester, provided me with some materials to familiarize myself with the process of creating a digital collection of historical documents.  Anne and I met and discussed the project plan and schedule and she introduced me to Janet Weaver, the assistant curator at the Iowa Women's Archives (IWA).  Janet was able to pull a few boxes from the Iowa Rural Women's collection and I began browsing through them. 

What I've found out about the project so far is that I will be building a digital collection from the ground up around the Iowa Rural Women's collection.  So first I will plan the project and decide how much I want to digitize, I will choose which archives to focus on (right now, the idea [Karen and Janet's] for a theme is to pick archives pertaining to all the different regions of the state and create a map interface), and I will begin scanning the documents.  After that, I wil load the scans into ContentDM, add metadata, design an interface, and launch the collection.  There will be a chance to work not only with text and images, but also with audio oral histories.

 So far I've looked through the following archives:

Freedom Township Women's Club

Lela Powers Briggs

Melba Gardemann Olson

Gwendolyn Johnson Hein

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