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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