Denda, Marker, Sun, Vidal, Graham and Canfield win 2012 ACRL WGSS Significant Achievement Award

CHICAGO – Kayo Denda, Alicia Graham, Rhonda Marker and Li Sun of Rutgers University Libraries and Kirsten Canfield and Lucy Vidal of the Center for Women’s Global Leadership in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University are the winners of the 2012 Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Women and Gender Studies Section (WGSS) Award for Significant Achievement in Woman’s Studies Librarianship. Denda, Marker, Sun, Vidal, Graham and Canfield were recognized for their work on the Poster Collection portal, http://cwgl.rutgers.edu/globalcenter/additional.html, which provides digitized access to approximately 300 posters from women’s rights organizations.

This project is a collaboration between the Rutgers University Center for Women’s Global Leadership (CWGL) and Women’s and Gender Studies department, both of the School of Arts and Sciences, and the Rutgers University Libraries.

The WGSS award honors a significant or one-time contribution to women’s studies librarianship.

A plaque will be presented to Denda and colleagues at 8:15 a.m. on June 28, 2012, at the WGSS program during the ALA Annual Conference in Anaheim, Calif.

“When speaking about the importance of a particular digital project, historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich said, ‘Digitization will help democratize scholarship, but in the right hands it will also produce more thorough and imaginative research,’” said award chair Jane Nichols of Oregon State University. “Kayo Denda and her colleagues at Rutgers University have created a digital project that will do just this. The Center for Women’s Global Leadership at Rutgers has a large collection of posters from women’s right organizations around the world.  By digitizing and making approximately 300 of these posters searchable and accessible, this team has created a project that will expand and facilitate research on feminist visual politics and aesthetics.”

Denda and her colleagues first presented their work on the poster project during the ACRL WGSS poster session at the 2011 ALA Annual Conference in New Orleans.  Their poster, “Please, May We Include Your Poster in our Repository? Permission Due Diligence and Supporting Rights Metadata Presentation,” explored an ethical model of obtaining and documenting the permissions process and creating associated metadata. 

The project nominators emphasized the unique value this collection will have for students, faculty, researchers and anyone looking for visual representations of women’s human rights activism.  Scholars are already using this important collection to enrich and inform their work. Next month, Mary Hawkesworth’s forthcoming book “Worlds of Women: Activism, Advocacy, and Governance in the Twenty-first Century” (Westview Press, 2012), uses 10 images from the collection to visually represent her chapter narratives.  As scholars and students from across the curriculum increasingly engage with visual materials as a way to understand their subjects, projects like the CWGL poster collection will grow in importance.

Kayo Denda is head of the Margery Somers Foster Center and women’s studies librarian, Rutgers University Libraries; Rhonda Marker is repository collection librarian, Rutgers University Libraries; Li Sun is metadata librarian, Rutgers University Libraries; Alicia Graham is research associate, Rutgers University Libraries; Lucy Vidal is information and communication director, Center for Women's Global Leadership, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University; Kirsten Canfield is research associate, Center for Women's Global Leadership, School of Arts and Sciences, Rutgers University.

For more information regarding the ACRL WGSS Award for Significant Achievement in Woman’s Studies Librarianship, or a complete list of past recipients, please visit http://www.ala.org/acrl/awards/achievementawards/WGSS_Significant_Achievement_Award.

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