Bryn Mawr College gets $40K grant to develop digital archive of ‘Seven Sisters’ colleges

Bryn Mawr College, the Montgomery County women’s college, was awarded a one-year $39,650 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a digital archive of the “Seven Sisters,” a group of women’s colleges that includes Bryn Mawr, according to the school’s Communications Office.

The archive will focus the first generation of the students at the schools, including Barnard, Mt. Holyoke and Smith. Bryn Mawr’s Special Collections department will lead the effort to digitize materials from each of the school’s libraries. The aim is to make the collections widely accessible, according to the release.

The NEH grant is to get the project off the ground, said Eric Pumroy, head of the Special Collections department.

“The content of the archive isn’t likely to be very deep when the project is over, but our goal is to have a prototype system working well enough that it will serve as the anchor for a series of cooperative digitization projects that will build rich historical collections on the history of women’s education,” he wrote in an email.

The project has roots in the work of Bryn Mawr’s Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education, a site that offers academic resources on the history of women’s education.