Women\u27s Egodocuments in Women\u27s Archive Database

During our presentation we are going to present the project “Women’s Archives”, which is being carried out since 2013 at the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences under the leadership of prof. Monika Rudaś-Grodzka. The project aims to create a database and launch a digital archive of unpublished life writing written by women who lived in the territories of historic Poland since the sixteenth century to the present. The database resulting from the project will include women’s manuscripts traced down on the basis of research in various archives in contemporary Poland and other European countries, with a particular emphasis on the areas associated with Polish culture through their status as its former territories (parts of Lithuania, Ukraine, Belarus and Russia). The manuscripts in the online catalogue are indexed according to criteria essential for future analysis of their content, such as authorship, place and time of origin, literary genre, plus a number of keywords that primarily come from gender studies and are related to such disciplines as the history of customs, anthropology, sociology, history, political science, pedagogy, and cultural and literary studies. The catalogue, which is now available only to the members of the project team, will serve as the basis for a digital archive, which will be developed in the future (in 2018) as a website accessible to anyone. It seems to us that the importance of the project “Archives of Women” cannot be overstated. The database, searchable by multiple criteria, including thematic criteria, and including information on existing manuscripts by women, will be helpful to all scholars interested in the history of literature, cultural history, cultural anthropology, as well as gender issues in Poland and related territories. During our speech we would like to present our projecting detail: it’s aims, inspirations, methods of work, problems. Furthermore, we would like to introduce the most valuable discoveries found during archival research conducted by the team of “Women’s Archive” and thematic sections of the archive. Moreover we will discuss technical solutions applied in our database