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Historians and Librarians Unite!: 25 Years of Collaborations Recording

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Historians and Librarians Unite!: 25 Years of Collaborations

Thursday, November 3, 2022 4:00 PM EDT

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (WASM) first appeared online in December 1997. Over 25 years this online journal and database has grown to include some 200,000 pages of primary documents and interpretive documents building on those documents. In the process of constructing the database, its historian editors have collaborated extensively with librarian authors. In this panel we share the experiences of three librarians who became major contributors.

Document projects have been the central publication on WASM, consisting of an interpretive essay and 20-30 primary documents. In 2016, Cindy Ingold, a librarian at the University of Illinois, published a document project, “How Did Women's Groups in the American Library Association Promote Activism around Women's Issues in Librarianship during the 1970s?” She will discuss the project and its impact on her work as a librarian.

In about 2014 Thomas Dublin, co-editor of WASM, began a new project to construct a database consisting of crowdsourced biographical sketches of more than 3,000 grassroots women suffragists. Kelly Blessinger, a librarian at Louisiana State University, was an early volunteer. She wrote two sketches, but more importantly she organized fellow librarians at LSU to participate. She will discuss recruiting other Louisiana librarians to complete biographical sketches and her part in the project including the tools she used. Additionally, she will briefly cover two other crowdsourced historical projects she is participating in.

Our third presenter, Tammie Busch, librarian at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, came to the suffragist crowdsourcing project by serving as Missouri state coordinator, recruiting volunteers, assigning suffragists, and copyediting completed sketches for almost 80 Missouri suffragists. She welcomed the opportunity to work with volunteer authors from varied backgrounds. She describes how the project made her a better librarian, collaborator, and project manager.

Historians and Librarians Unite!: 25 Years of Collaborations

Thursday, November 17, 2022 4:00 PM EST

Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000 (WASM) first appeared online in December 1997. Over 25 years this online journal and database has grown to include some 200,000 pages of primary documents and interpretive documents building on those documents. In the process of constructing the database, its historian editors have collaborated extensively with librarian authors. In this panel we share the experiences of three librarians who became major contributors.

Document projects have been the central publication on WASM, consisting of an interpretive essay and 20-30 primary documents. In 2016, Cindy Ingold, a librarian at the University of Illinois, published a document project, “How Did Women's Groups in the American Library Association Promote Activism around Women's Issues in Librarianship during the 1970s?” She will discuss the project and its impact on her work as a librarian.

In about 2014 Thomas Dublin, co-editor of WASM, began a new project to construct a database consisting of crowdsourced biographical sketches of more than 3,000 grassroots women suffragists. Kelly Blessinger, a librarian at Louisiana State University, was an early volunteer. She wrote two sketches, but more importantly she organized fellow librarians at LSU to participate. She will discuss recruiting other Louisiana librarians to complete biographical sketches and her part in the project including the tools she used. Additionally, she will briefly cover two other crowdsourced historical projects she is participating in.

Our third presenter, Tammie Busch, librarian at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, came to the suffragist crowdsourcing project by serving as Missouri state coordinator, recruiting volunteers, assigning suffragists, and copyediting completed sketches for almost 80 Missouri suffragists. She welcomed the opportunity to work with volunteer authors from varied backgrounds. She describes how the project made her a better librarian, collaborator, and project manager.

Cindy is liaison to the departments of Asian American Studies Gender and Women’s Studies, and Political Science and to the American Indian Studies and Women and Gender in Global Perspectives Programs. She also provides outreach and services to several cultural and resource centers on campus. Cindy’s current area of research focuses on women’s groups within the American Library Association as social movement organizations. Professionally, Cindy is active in the Women and Gender Studies Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries where she has served on and chaired several committees. She is also a member of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA), and has co-chaired the Librarians Task Force of NWSA.

Tammie Busch has over twenty years of experience working in public, school, and academic libraries. She received her MLIS from the University of Missouri and her MA in History from Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. She is currently the Catalog and Metadata Librarian and Supervisor of Technical Services at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville.