Week 2: Collections

The exhibit Recognizing Women’s Right to Vote in New York State is a digital collection from the New York Heritage digital collection. It was curated by Susan Goodier, and Sally Roesch Wagner of the South Central Regional Library Council in partnership with the Empire State Library Network and New York Heritage Digital Collections. Being an online collection, it’s free and available for everyone to utilize. 

The collection is easily accessible on the New York Heritage Digital Collections website. Each image in the collection includes a link to a page with incredibly detailed information about the item or image. This tool makes research a lot easier because information like dates, state/area of origin, and who created the image/artwork is already available. The collection is not indexed in any major database. 

I selected this collection because I think it is a great example of an accessible and extensive digital archive. Many of the digital archives from the New York Heritage digital collection are great resources for research, but Recognizing Women’s Right to Vote in New York State is a really amazing archive for all things related to women’s voting suffrage in the 1910s. I appreciate that the exhibit is very thorough in its telling of the history of women’s right to vote, covering before, during, and after women gained their right to vote. The collection also includes the history and perspective of women of color during this time who fought for their right to vote. Along with extensive texts, the images of flyers, banners, art, and women from 1910s New York hold a lot of information and context within them that’s very valuable for research. 

Hopes and Gifts

My hopes for my learning and research journey with StoryMakers all revolve around my desire to present research and data in the most clear and accessible way. I think overly academic and technical language that often isn't accompanied with definitions can be a barrier for people to access research like this. When I gather all my information about the lives and roles of indigenous women during the revolutionary war, I hope I can write about their lives in a way that portrays all of the intricacies of their lives and beliefs. I’m hoping to gain a lot of insights about the lives and roles of indigenous women from this time period by using under utilized sources, like examining clothing and goods to see what kinds of things women were making at the time and try to infer from those goods some of the values and beliefs the women may have held. Specifically I need more guidance and practice about the most effective and accessible ways to convey my research. I think one of the gifts I bring to this project is my prior experience in research, but I’m so excited to engage in highly collaborative research like this.