All her yesterdays
Wed, 02 Nov 2011 15:42:00 GMT
A MAJOR website hosted by the University of Huddersfield and developed in partnership with West Yorkshire Archives Service means that researchers around the world will be a mouse click away from more than 80,000 fascinating documents that uncover the lives led by Yorkshire women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Named ‘History to Herstory’, the project was funded to the tune of £54,000 and the website goes live on Friday 7 October, with the address http://www.historytoherstory.org.uk/. Users will be able to explore a vast online archive of diaries, letters, journals, minutes and other written material plus photographs and artworks that tell the story of women’s lives as led in the home, the workplace, the political arena and even the mental asylum. Also, the lives of famous women such as author Charlotte Bronte and aviator Amy Johnson can be explored through original documents.
The digitised material comes from the holdings of the West Yorkshire Archives, the archives of the University of Huddersfield, plus Hull University and the Bronte Society.
“We’re delighted to be online,” said Dr Rob Ellis (pictured), of the History Department at the University of Huddersfield. He was a member of the steering party which redeveloped the website. “This is a digitised archive that can be used for many purposes by anybody, from academic researchers to family historians,” he added.
The story of ‘History to Herstory’ began in 2002, when it was first created as an innovative means of providing online access to digitised documents dealing with women’s history. But it was a little ahead of its time and did not function very well, says the Head of West Yorkshire Archives Service, Katy Goodrum.
It was decided to rebuild the website and earlier this year the e-content organisation JISC provided £42,545 so that a team could reboot ‘History to Herstory’. The University of Huddersfield contributed a further £11,601. Work began in May and has now been completed, with the site being hosted by the University of Huddersfield’s web server. Completely redesigned, it is now a fully-functioning, inter-active website that can be accessed free of charge globally.
The site also includes packages of learning materials, assembled by research assistants at the University of Huddersfield. Covering themes such as women and politics, women at work, women at war and women’s correspondence, the packages can be used for a wide variety of educational purposes. Some of the material will be used for undergraduate modules at the University of Huddersfield itself.
“This is a fantastic resource,” says Katy Goodrum, “and the main thing for me is a huge amount of the material is in women’s own words, which is quite rare.”
She added that people were still able to consult the original documents if they wished, and links on every digitised item reveal where the source material is archived.
“We certainly don’t want to deprive people of the ability to see the originals, but the website means you don’t have to travel from half way around the world to use the material.”
“History to Herstory” will continue to grow, and is part of an ambitious digitisation programme by West Yorkshire Archive Service, which is responsible for millions of documents. The service has already formed a partnership with the subscription website Ancestry.com, digitising and making available no fewer 24 million parish records from the region. These became available in June and during August there were 80,000 downloads a day.
Professor Tim Thornton, a historian who is the University of Huddersfield’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Teaching and Learning, said: “This website is a great example of bringing underused resources back into the public gaze, and I’m very pleased that we’ve been able to take a lead on the project.”
JISC programme manager Alastair Dunning said: “Exploiting Britain’s cultural treasures in the digital age is not just about digitisation but using the internet to tell stories about them. The University of Huddersfield’s From History to Herstory does this in an innovative way, presenting women’s history in Yorkshire in a new light.”
