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

Chapter Poggio Bracciolini, Phyllis Goodhart Gordan, and the Formation of the Goodhart Collection of Fifteenth-Century Books at Bryn Mawr College

The Poggio Bracciolini conference was dedicated to Bryn Mawr alumna Phyllis Goodhart Gordan (1913-1994) one of the leading Poggio scholars of her generation and the editor of the only major collection of Poggio’s letters in English, Two Renaissance Book Hunters (Columbia University Press, 1974). Gordan and her father, Howard Lehman Goodhart (1887-1951) were also responsible for building one of the great collections of 15th century printed books in America, most of which is now at Bryn Mawr College. This paper draws upon Goodhart’s correspondence with rare book dealers and the extensive notes on his books to survey the strengths of the collection and to examine the process by which he built the collection and worked with rare book dealers in the difficult Depression and World War II years, the period when he acquired most of his books. The paper also considers Goodhart’s growing connections with scholars of early printing as his collection and interests grew, in particular the work of Margaret Bingham Stillwell, the editor of Incunabula in American Libraries (1940)

History of Women\u27s Education Open Access Portal Project

White Paper prepared for the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources as part of a grant for the History of Women\u27s Education Open Access Portal Project

College Women: Documenting the Student Experience at the Seven Sisters Colleges

White Paper prepared for the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources as part of a grant for the College Women: Documenting the Student Experience at the Seven Sisters College

College Women: Documenting the Student Experience at the Seven Sisters Colleges

White Paper prepared for the National Endowment for the Humanities Division of Preservation and Access, Humanities Collections and Reference Resources as part of a grant for the College Women: Documenting the Student Experience at the Seven Sisters College

Architectures of the Text: An Inquiry Into the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili

Architectures of the Text: An Inquiry Into the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili A symposium to celebrate the acquisition of the second edition of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1545) by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. Website To download podcasts of the lectures, select the additional files below. Files in .mp4 format include images; files in .mp3 format are audio only. To download the symposium program, select download button at right. In April 2011, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries acquired a copy of the uncommon second edition of Francesco Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice 1545). Since the appearance of the first edition in 1499, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili has been heralded as the most beautiful book to appear in the Italian Renaissance. Printed in Venice by Aldus Manutius, “The Dream of Poliphily” was admired by Aldus’s contemporaries for its scholarship and value as an architectural treatise. Forty-six years after the publication of the first edition, Aldus’s heirs printed a second edition in 1545. This second edition suggests a renewed interest in the work, within Italy and beyond, for within a year a French translation appeared, followed by an English translation in 1592. Celebrated for its typographical design and illustrations, the Hypnerotomachia continues to attract the interest of scholars, typophiles, and collectors; it remains available in modern scholarly editions in both print and electronic format. The University of Pennsylvania Libraries\u27 acquisition came at the suggestion of John Dixon Hunt, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture at the University. Funds for its purchase came from the G. Holmes Perkins Books and Archives Fund, established by G. Holmes Perkins, Professor of Architecture and Urbanism and former dean of the Graduate School of Fine Arts (now the School of Design). The Libraries and the School of Design administer this fund jointly. On February 11, 2012, the Anne and Jerome Fisher Fine Arts Library, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, and the School of Design collaborated on a one-day symposium to celebrate the acquisition of the Hypnerotomachia. Presentations took place in the Class of \u2755 room, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library. Program: 10:30am-11:30am Movement 1: Books and Histories Welcome: David McKnight William B. Keller, Hypnerotomachia Joins the Perkins Library: Collecting to Support Persuasion in Architectural Design and History Eric Pumroy, Remarks on the 1499 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili at Bryn Mawr Special Collections John Dixon Hunt, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: A Child\u27s Guide to the Story Line and a Look at its Afterlives Lynne Farrington, \u27Though I could lead a quiet and peaceful life, I have chosen one full of toil and trouble\u27: Aldus Manutius and the Printing History of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili 11:30am-1:00pm Movement 2: Words and Interpretations Victoria Kirkham, Hypno What? A Dreamer\u27s Vision and the Reader\u27s Nightmare Ann Moyer, The Wanderings of Poliphilo through Renaissance Studies Ian White, Multiple Words, Multiple Meanings in the Hypnerotomachia 2:00pm-3:00pm Movement 3: Art and Illustration Chris Nygren, The Hypnerotomachia and Italian Art Circa 1500 Larry Silver, Not Hypnerotomachia: Venice\u27s Other Early Woodcut Illustrations 3:00pm-4:30pm Movement 4: Imagined Architectures Raffaella Fabiani Giannetto, \u27Not before either known or dreamt of\u27: The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili and the Craft of Wonder David Leatherbarrow, What Fragments are to Desire, Elements are to Design Ian White, Mathematical Design in Poliphilo\u27s Imaginary Building, The Temple of Venus 4:30pm-5:00pm Break and Interlude Shushi Yoshinaga, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili: A Modern Heritage : a display of objects and images 5:00pm-6:00pm Movement 5: Contemporary Resonances and Final Observation

Collegewomen.org: Documenting the History of Women’s College Students

This paper will report on the development of the Collegewomen.org project, a collaborative digital project among the American women’s colleges formerly known as the Seven Sisters: Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Smith, Vassar, Wellesley, and Radcliffe (now part of Harvard University) to create a searchable collection of diaries, letters, scrapbooks and photographs documenting students’ lives from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The project has been funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2014 and 2016, and is currently live in a beta site at www.collegewomen.org. The letters and diaries written by the first generations of women to attend college in the United States tell compelling stories of their struggles and ambitions as they negotiated new roles for women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through these writings, their writings, the students discussed political reform and women’s rights; career opportunities and discrimination; sexuality and body image; traditions and campus culture; religion, race and class; and the challenges of living through wars, civil strife, depressions and epidemics. Large number of these student writings are found in the archives of women’s colleges, and together they tell not only important individual stories, but also a critical, and largely understudied, part of the larger story of the transformation of American society and women’s place in that society during those critical years. In-depth research using these student writings has been impeded by their dispersal across multiple institutions and by the difficulty of locating comparable materials across institutions. By bringing digital versions of the these collections together in a single searchable database, the value of the collections will be greatly increased by the ability to see the writings in conversation with each other, as part of a larger phenomenon in the history of women in America, rather than as isolated fragments that document only the history of the individual colleges. The paper will examine not only the goals of the project, but also the technical and organizational work required to build and sustain a collaborative digital archive. It will also discuss the outreach and supplemental content that is needed to make the stories in the digital archive come alive for not only scholars and students, but also a broader audience of alumnae and high school students. Finally, the paper will discuss future development of the project, and the potential for including student writings from other women’s institutions in both the United State and internationally