Summer already feels long behind us, as recently returned Mawrters and their professors get back into the swing of things and the weather cools. Now that everyone is settling in for the new semester, it’s an ideal time to catch up on what you missed over the past season of activity at The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center! We had an eventful summer, both finishing old projects and pushing forward on new ones, and, of course, we welcomed our new Director to campus. Here’s a recap of what we’ve been up to and a preview of some things we’ll be sharing soon:

• Monica Mercado arrived in July and immediately hit the ground running. Already she has been through new faculty orientation, CLIR training, an ArcGIS workshop, and more—and somehow found time to return to the University of Chicago to graduate with her PhD in August.

• The 2013 Pensby Center interns, Alexis De La Rosa ’15 and Lauren Footman ’14, put the finishing touches on their digital exhibit exploring the experiences of students and staff of color on campus. In addition to Lauren and Alexis’s research documenting a history of diversity at Bryn Mawr, results from Alexis’s survey to alumnae about their experiences, and original photography of students and spaces on campus, the exhibit includes a series of new oral history interviews that tell the stories of faculty, staff, and students who were impacted by issues of race and class during their time at Bryn Mawr. The digital project A Point of Difference was released in July and can be viewed here. 

• This summer we partnered with the Tri-Co Digital Humanities Initiative to host Brenna Levitin ’16 for an archival project with a digital twist. In May Brenna began her research on the history of LGBT communities at Bryn Mawr between the years 1970 and 2000, a topic that resonates with other recent endeavors to give voice to the histories of marginalized groups on campus (including A Point of Difference and History of Gender Identity and Expression at Bryn Mawr College, by Emmett Binkowski ‘16). As Brenna moved from research based in the physical archives, to conducting interviews and oral histories with alumnae/i and faculty, to building her own digital exhibit, she documented the successes and challenges of her process here on the blog. Stay tuned for the launch of Brenna’s exhibit, “We Are/We Have Always Been” in October.
  

  Brainstorming keywords for the title of the search portal.

• We continued our collaboration with the “Seven Sisters” women’s colleges, funded by a National Endowment for the Humanities planning grant, to make all seven institutions’ collections on student life in early American women’s higher education searchable from a common digital hub. We convened at Barnard College this July to discuss technical details, user experience, and debate names for the website, which is now in the design phase.

• We began making plans to increase outreach to Bryn Mawr students on campus. We are partnering with SGA to increase preservation of materials related to student organizations and student life, and last week Special Collections received the SGA records from the last thirteen years for processing. Keep your eye out for opportunities to get involved, like a Personal Digital Archiving Day and a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon, both coming next month!

This week we’re also excited to celebrate the inauguration of Bryn Mawr’s ninth president, Kim Cassidy. In addition to the blog, follow us on Twitter and tumblr for Bryn Mawr histories and more updates as our work continues to unfold.