History of Women's Education Open Access Portal Project

Bryn Mawr College, in collaboration with Barnard College, Mount Holyoke College, Smith College, Vassar College, Wellesley College, and the Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, seeks support for a Foundations project to develop a shared approach to cataloging and providing access to the letters, diaries, and scrapbooks from the first generations of women to attend college. The seven colleges, once known as the Seven Sisters and regarded as the equivalent of the Ivy League before those institutions admitted women, contain extensive holdings of student personal writings dating back to the late-nineteenth century, an unparalleled and only partially tapped resource for the study of a wide range of women's history issues over the last century and a half. The seven institutions propose to make their collections more widely accessible through the development of a common search portal and shared standards for metadata and thematic vocabulary