Notable Women of Simmons College

The mission of the Notable Women of Simmons College project is to animate the lives of early college women through their scrapbooks and other memorabilia, to serve not only as a record of a student's college experience, but also as an entrée into a rich understanding of the social conditions and historical period in which these women lived. The collection aims to portray the lives and times of these pioneers, highlighting their intellectual achievements and leisure activities, as well as the cultural and historical context of their experiences while attending the College.

For the past several years, students from LIS 462, the Digital Libraries course taught by GSLIS Professor Candy Schwartz, have selected a scrapbook from the Archives’s collection to digitize and present in an electronic format. The students’ work encompasses all aspects of the production process, including content, descriptive metadata, digitization, web development, intellectual property, and marketing. The library is built using Greenstone Digital Library open source software.

In 2005, a digital library was created from the scrapbook of Marion Pearl Ayer, a Simmons graduate of 1917 in the Business program. This fall’s virtual scrapbook highlights the Simmons experience of Ruth Mitchell Wunderly, a 1919 graduate from the Home Economics program; residence life, sports events, group outings, and a romance with a University of Maine student are told in photographs, letters and notes, dance cards, and train tickets, among other items. The Wonderly Digital Library also provides a wealth of further information on life at Simmons and in Boston in the early 20 th century, as well as information on developing and using digital libraries.

Students have overseen these semester-long endeavors from conception through creation, stopping just short of making them available on the web. The College Archives is now pleased to invite the entire Simmons community to view and experience these projects.

• Olive Ruby Henty
• Ruth Mitchell Wunderly
• Marion Pearl Ayer

Page updated: December 13, 2007