“I believe that the issues we women were involved in were really so universal. We were trying hard to touch every part of the world; every part of thinking; and every part of what was going on here, there, and everywhere,”
Miriam Schapiro, 2004.

Since the birth of the contemporary Women’s Art Movement, Rutgers University has worked hand-in-hand with feminist women artists and art historians to nurture, exhibit, and document art by women. The Women Artists Archives National Directory (WAAND) is the latest pioneering project designed to capitalize on the shared experience and expertise of Rutgers’ artists and art historians and its vaunted information technology specialists. Housed at the Margery Somers Foster Center, Rutgers University Libraries (RUL), and funded initially by the Getty Foundation, this new endeavor is a comprehensive survey of U.S. archival collections holding primary source documents of and about women visual artists active in the U.S. since 1945. The result is a Web directory for use as a research tool by scholars, students, artists, collecting institutions, and the general public. In its content and its methodology, WAAND is designed to become a model in the development of archival directories.

Any archive holding primary source material about any U.S. woman visual artist active after 1945 is encouraged to complete and submit a repository directory form for women artists represented in its collections.

WAAND’s principal investigators are Dr. Ferris Olin, head of the Margery Somers Foster Center and curator of the Mary H. Dana Women Artist Series at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library, RUL, and Judith K. Brodsky, Rutgers distinguished professor emerita in the Department of Visual Arts and founding director of the Brodsky Center for Print, Mason Gross School of the Arts. Grace Agnew, Rutgers Associate Librarian for Digital Library Systems, and Jane D. Johnson, project manager for the Moving Image Collections (MIC) and visiting scholar at Rutgers, are WAAND’s digital architects. Nicole Plett is project manager.

Rutgers University Libraries has laid the groundwork for the WAAND project by developing the architecture, metadata schema, protocols, and survey instruments used to effectively describe collections and digital objects. Rutgers is the lead developer on Moving Image Collections (MIC), a Web portal providing an archive directory, union catalog, and informational resources on archival moving images, a project initially funded by the National Science Foundation. In addition, RUL is part of a consortium of groups awarded a grant in 2004 to build the New Jersey Digital Highway, a Web portal to digital cultural information in archival collections throughout the state.

WAAND is designed to serve as the platform for a subsequent initiative to create a dynamic Web portal for material pertaining to the documentation of women visual artists active in the U.S. during the post-World War II period. This portal would serve as a virtual, collaborative, multi-institutional gateway to scholarly resources.


WAAND consists of three linked databases: a Repository Directory, Collections, and an Entity (artist or artists' organization) Database.

The Repository Directory is a database of organizations; it includes name, location, contact information, services provided, audiences served, and access policies for each organization. The Collections database describes the primary source material on a particular woman artist or artists’ organization that is held by a particular repository. The Entity database will comprise basic information about the artist, such as dates of activity, genres, and regions where the artist has worked. In order to more readily identify papers of individual women artists within larger collections, the Entity database includes entries for artist organizations and collectives such as artist publications, alternative spaces, and artists’ communities.

The databases are linked to one another through unique identifiers. This allows information about the artist and the primary source material to display together with information about the archive holding the collection. This database structure is transparent to the end users.

WAAND
Institute for Women & Art at Rutgers
191 College Avenue, Second Floor
New Brunswick, NJ 08901
Phone: 732-932-3726 x15
http://waand.rutgers.edu
waand@rci.rutgers.edu