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Like most library research holdings, Smith College's Sophia Smith Collection (SSC)--some 5,000 linear feet of material in manuscript, print and audiovisual formats--has always been housed in folders and boxes. Now it resides on the World Wide Web as well. The collection was founded in 1942 as the college library's distinctive contribution to Smith's mission of educating women. It evolved under the leadership of its first director, Margaret Storrs Grierson '22, who died in December 1997, from a collection of works by women writers into a historical research collection of material documenting the lives and activities of women. Today its holdings, housed in the Alumnae Gymnasium, authenticate the historical experience of women in the United States and abroad from the colonial era to the present. Its subject strengths include birth control, women's rights, suffrage, the contemporary women's movement, U.S. women working abroad, the arts (especially theater), the professions (especially journalism and social work), and middle-class family life in 19th- and 20th-century New England. The collection's new Web site (www.smith.edu/libraries/ssc) provides access for "our worldwide constituency," says SSC director Sherrill Redmon, "from research scholars to high schoolers and their teachers--in a fashion, unusual for archives, that combines a basic form of what librarians call 'bibliographic access' with generic Web style. This is very helpful to distant scholars and meets a critical need to get the word out about the specific women's history and social history collections we hold." Visitors to the SSC home page will find a wealth of information about the collection-everything from news of events, exhibits and recent acquisitions to a "nearly complete" alphabetical listing of SSC manuscript collections. Links can take a browser to related Web sites such as the Women's Liberation Directory at Duke University, the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America at Radcliffe College or the National Women's History Project. At the SSC site, you can learn how to inquire about donating papers or other materials to the collection or how to support its growth with a financial contribution; you can find the cost of photocopying items in the collection; or read news about the collection's doings, including the processing, now underway, of selected contemporary manuscript collections documenting 20th-century U.S. social reform and political activism, or the collection having recently received the Margaret Sanger Award from the Family Planning Council of Western Massachusetts. Among the illustrations that might catch your eye is a photograph of "Margaret Sanger and mothers at the Tucson Birth Control Clinic in June of 1936" (from the Margaret Sanger Papers) or one of "Helen Gurley Brown promoting Sex and the Single Girl at the Gaslight Club in New York City in 1962" (Helen Gurley Brown Papers). Funding for the Web site comes from a $1.8 million bequest that Smith received last year from Margie Heath Fraenkel '25, part of which was earmarked to help underwrite expanded electronic access to the Sophia Smith Collection. Credit for presenting the Sophia Smith Collection in its lively and accessible Web format goes to the site's designers, Ada Comstock Scholars Pam Davis '98 and Belinda Darcey. An anthropology major, Davis says she has found Web design exciting because "it's constantly changing. There are new things to be learned and always new, cool things you can add to a site." Darcey, who says she was "terrified of e-mail" when she came to Smith a year ago, credits her newfound Web expertise to long hours spent in the college's digital design studio. "It's an example of one of those doors that open for you when you come to Smith," she says. To date, the Davis/Darcey team has been getting its feet wet with Smith-related Web projects, but their ultimate goal is to establish a full-fledged business partnership in Web design in the Northampton area. If cyberspace travel to the virtual Sophia Smith Collection whets your appetite for exposure to the actual holdings, you'll find accommodation listings for Northampton on the Web site, along with the maps you'll need to get to the real collection by more traditional modes of transportation. |
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