New website puts spotlight on women in history
More than 80,000 fascinating documents that uncover the lives led by Yorkshire women such as Charlotte Bronte in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries are now only a mouse click away.
A major website launches today hosted by the University of Huddersfield, developed in partnership with West Yorkshire Archives Service and funded by Jisc.
Researchers, archivists and the general public can now 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.
Famous women such as author Charlotte Bronte and aviator Amy Johnson lives can be explored through original documents on the Jisc-funded ‘History to Herstory’ website.
University of Huddersfield’s Pro-Vice Chancellor for Teaching and Learning, Professor Tim Thornton, himself a historian, 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.”
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.
Alastair Dunning, programme manager at Jisc, 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.”
“We’re delighted to be online,” said Dr Rob Ellis, of the History Department at the University of Huddersfield.“This is a digitised archive that can be used for many purposes by anybody, from academic researchers to family historians,” he added.
The site also includes packages of learning materials, 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, Head of Archives at West Yorkshire Archive Services, “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.”
View highlights of the collection.
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Visit the History to Herstory website