Margery Somers Foster Center

My name is Alexandra Steiger and I will be participating in an internship at the Margery Somers Foster Center this fall! I am currently working on my Masters Degree in Library and Information Science from the School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University.  I also received my Bachelor’s Degree in English from Rutgers.

My interest was certainly peaked when I heard about the project that was being conducted here at the Margery Somers Foster Center.

They have been conducting a project that will capture, restore, and preserve oral histories from women who graduated from the New Jersey College for Women.

The New Jersey College for Women became known as Douglass College in 1955 after Mabel Smith Douglass, the college’s founder.

In keeping with Rutgers’ mission of diversity, these women who were interviewed are from many different backgrounds and each have a unique perspective on life at the New Jersey College for Women.

I will be specifically looking into scrapbooks from students and graduates in order to provide visual representations of life at Rutgers. The team has found that Dean’s papers as well as yearbooks do not go far enough in creating a rich understanding of what life was like at the New Jersey College for Women.

Personally, I have made many scrapbooks of my family and friends in the past. Scrapbooking has become more commercial in recent years as stores like Michael’s and A.C. Moore have entire sections devoted to tools for scrapbooking. I understand the care it takes to insert and position memorabilia into a book that will hopefully be preserved for many years. Creating scrapbooks, as well as viewing them, produces a very strong emotional and nostalgic reaction for me. Throughout this internship, I would like to the see how the history of scrapbooking has shaped its current popularity.

Kayo Denda, head of the Margery Somers Foster Center, has already obtained one scrapbook from a woman named Florence Marshall who later became Florence Nash. Florence graduated from the New Jersey College for Women in 1929.

I will strive to find other depictions of life in that time period. I will be unearthing scrapbooks throughout my internship and I will share my findings as I move through the semester.

At the Aresty Undergraduate Research Symposium on Friday April 24, 2015 Aya Sakar ’15 and Kelly Jin ’17 presented 2 projects they have worked since September 2014. Both projects explore different aspects of the history of Douglass College.

Aya’ project Perspectives on Diversity and Multiculturalism on Douglass Campus, from the 1920s to the 1950s identifies women of color from Quair yearbooks and track their post-Douglass years with the archival material from the Associate Alumnae of Douglass College and other sources. The majority of women became teachers and librarians. Although most women were from from New Jersey, there were international students from Japan, Egypt, India, China, and Iran. This project received one of the three honorable mention awards in the Humanities Category.

Kelly’s project Mapping Douglass Campus, 1920s to 1950s, consists of an interactive historical map (ThingLink)  embedded with images of buildings and quotes about the buildings by the founding Dean Mabel Smith Douglass, passages from Alumnae Bulletin, and quotes from Douglass alumnae from the Douglass Alumnae Oral History Project interviews.  Kelly hopes this interactive map can introduce incoming Douglass Residential College students more accessible information on college history.

This is a guest post by Peregrine MacDonald, a Rutgers MLIS student and information assistant at Douglass Library.

We are pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Margery Somers Foster Undergraduate Multimedia Award. We invite all members of the Rutgers Community to attend the fifth Annual Celebrating Creativity event, where the awards will be presented. The event will be held on Thursday April 16, 3-5PM, in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library on the Douglass campus.

The undergraduate multimedia award acknowledges the creative use of university library collections in the production of a multimedia-based research project focused on women’s or gender issues. The Libraries are pleased to recognize five projects, including two award winners, an honorable mention, and two finalists. The two award recipients are:

 

Lauren Caputo, a senior majoring in communications, won the award for her project “Becoming Syd” a short documentary about a transgender-queer relationship that explores how these relationships can help shape identities. It was created in the course Directing the Documentary (spring 2014) taught by Ross Kauffman, an Academy Award winning documentary filmmaker.

 

Several students taking the Rutgers-Camden courses Gender and Sexuality in Literature, taught by Ellen Malenas Ledoux, and New Queer Cinema, taught by Dawn Walsh, won the award for their project “It Gets Better.” The project was conceived as a grass-roots version of the Internet-based social activism with the same name. It offers specific suggestions for how LGBTQ+ rights can be furthered on both interpersonal and policy levels.

 

Michelle Muska, a senior majoring in Environmental Policy, Institutions & Behavior, and Antoinette Gingerelli, a sophomore majoring in Political Science & Women’s Studies, will be recognized with an Honorable Mention for their project “The Role of Local Action: Birthing Kits and Maternal Mortality.” The project proposes local action to reduce maternal mortality and unsafe birth in conflict and crisis areas. This was a social action project for 2015 Douglass Global Summit and the Douglass Friends of United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) advised by Margot Baruch.

We would also like to recognize the two other finalists. Dara Harvey, majoring in public health, submitted the project “The Role of Women in Fairytale: Happily Ever After?” created for the Creating Writing course. Amy Ho, majoring in cell biology and neuroscience, submitted the project “Police Brutality Against People of Color,” created for the Introduction to Multimedia Composition course. Chris Rzigalinski is teaching both courses this semester (spring 2015).

This year’s awards were made possible in part through the support of Dr. Irene Gnarra.

More photos from the event are available here.

This semester at the Margery Somers Foster Center there will be four Rutgers University students working on their respective research projects. With their combined effort, the MSFC is sure to be teeming with hard work and dedication. The four students and their projects, some coinciding with each other, are listed below.

Lauren Carboy is in her final semester of the Master of Library and Information Science Program at Rutgers online.

She is currently involved in a for-credit internship focusing in digital libraries. Her main project involves the Douglass Alumnae Oral History Project, which collects the stories of various Douglass Women’s College/NJC graduates throughout the years by way of interview. While additionally working on project organization, digitization, and transcription itself, Lauren plans on creating a short video documentary on one specific new interviewee, Susan Schwirk, and the unique story she has to tell. She hopes that working on the project and the video will display her digital, multimedia, and organizational skills positively, as well as giving her welcomed experience in digital humanities.

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Alex DelPriore is in his second semester of the on-campus MLIS program at Rutgers, with a planned specialization in Digital Libraries. He is currently exploring options for a virtual map and tour of the Mabel Smith Douglass Library, utilizing multimedia including 360° panorama views and video, to enable online users to familiarize themselves with the facilities, services, and spaces the library has to offer. Alex is also working on new potential formats and programs for a second mapping project of Douglass Campus which is fully explained in the next paragraph below.

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Along with Lauren and Alex, there are two Aresty students working within the Margery Somers Foster Center. Kelly Y. Jin is a Douglass Residential College student who plans to graduate in 2017.

She is majoring in computer science, and her project is entitled “Mapping Douglass Campus with Douglass Women’s Narratives: 1930’s through 1960’s.” In collaboration with the Douglass Alumnae Oral History Project, the assignment will take information from the interviews about buildings, landmarks, and physical spaces that were valued by the students on campus, and map them on an interactive map of Douglass Campus. The project will surely create an experiential narrative of college spaces over the course of four decades. It will also examine the women’s liberation movement in the 1960’s and the changes that amassed from it.

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The second Aresty student is Aya Sakar, a senior double majoring in English and History with a minor in Women’s and Gender Studies.

Aya is working on yet another project, entitled “Perspectives on Diversity and Multiculturalism on Douglass Campus from the 1930’s to the 1980’s.”This project hopes to illustrate how Douglass became a diverse and multicultural community, putting its focus on Rutgers black student protests, civil rights activism in the 1960’s, and showing how diversity affected campus culture with its influence on policies, student life, and the enrollment and hiring processes. The project will demonstrate Aya’s researching skills, as well as her digital and multimedia knowledge production skills.

Guest post by Angela Pagliaro, Information Assistant, Mabel Smith Douglass Library

The new MakerBot 3D printer is up and running in the Fordham Commons on the lower floor of the Mabel Smith Douglass Library. Learn more about the Makerspace on our LibGuide. 

Having 3D printers at Rutgers is a game changer for the humanities. Students now have a tool that allows them to engage and replicate content from the classroom. Having this type of technology creates endless possibilities of how students can interact with content. These types of interactions are essential for creativity and learning in the humanities, for more information about art and archaeology and 3D printing, check out this article from the Journal of Digital Humanities.

With these printers now at Rutgers, students and faculty have an opportunity to learn actively and create tangible items that can help others learn. The space is not one of designated silence but instead one where any subject can take physical form.

If history classes that study the layout of ancient Rome or Nebuchadnezzar’s garden, they can be replicated and brought to life with the 3D printer. Students can spend more time thinking about the details of the content and truly engaging with what they’re learning instead of obtaining the information passively. Technology has relevance to any area of study, especially the humanities, since maker culture is about designing, building, and repurposing.

For more information about the makerbot, contact Stacey Carton (sacarton@rci.rutgers.edu)

Please join us tomorrow, Wednesday, April 16 at 3 p.m. at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library to honor the winners of the Undergraduate Multimedia Awards and for a reading by Dr. Debotri Dhar, a recent Ph.D. graduate from Rutgers Women & Gender Studies department, from her book Postcards from Oxford: Stories of Women and Travel. 

We are delighted to announce the winners of the 4th Annual Undergraduate Multimedia Awards. We hope that you will be able to join us in presenting the awards at the event, Celebrating Creativity, Wednesday, April 16 in the Douglass Room at the Mabel Smith Douglass Library.

Co-Winners of the Margery Somers Foster Center Undergraduate Multimedia Award

The Project of Transformation by Mariah Eppes ’15

Mariah created this short documentary this semester for the Institute of Women’s Leadership with supervision from Sasha Taner. The video documents the work of Cheryl Clarke, a former Dean of Students at Rutgers University and poet, discusses her upbringing in Washington, D.C. during the Civil Rights Movement, her passion for writing, and the role of feminism. Clarke is a black lesbian feminist whose poetry, editorial work, and career at Rutgers has had a significant impact on black, lesbian, and women’s communities. This video is currently only available as a DVD. Please contact Kayo Denda at kdenda@rutgers.edu if you wish to arrange to view the film.

Home by Jamie Deradorian-Delia’14

Jamie created this video in the Fall 2013 semester for the Web series/filmmaking class at the Center for Digital Filmmaking under the supervision of Patrick Stettner. This short documentary/video art hybrid piece discusses the pressures that one woman feels to conform to the societal standards of beauty. It uses one character as a conduit to explore the issue of arbitrary definitions and labels that are put on her. View Home on Vimeo.

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Honorable Mentions

Swat Valley Princess by Taban Khan’14

This short documentary focuses on Zebu Jilani, who is giving back to her community in Swat Valley, Pakistan. Swat, originally considered the “Switzerland of Pakistan” has been controlled by Taliban militants in 2007 and suffered massive destruction by the earthquake in 2009. Zebu and her husband have found a non-profit organization to improve water quality, health care and reduce poverty of its women and children. View Swat Valley Princess on YouTube.

I’m not looking for coins, I’m looking for change by A-Nam Nguyen ’16 and Dominique Turner ’15

This short documentary film project is a profile of Jill Tice, a woman who is homeless and living in the city of New Brunswick. Jill talks about her childhood in Edison and her subsequent descent into poverty and homelessness due to drugs. She describes her experiences living on the street and her efforts at educating those in the community about what it is like to be homeless and how they can help in small ways. View I’m not looking for coins, I’m looking for change on YouTube.

This Is Not an Excuse by Carolina Fernandes ’16

This online book project attempts to bring awareness to SlutWalk, a movement that protests the tendency to refer to women’s clothing as a cause for unwanted sexual attention. She photographed college women in “party clothes,”asking the students to wear an outfit they would normally wear to a party. Putting this body of work in book form, stories of women who were raped or almost raped in college, specifically Rutgers, were added. View This Is Not an Excuse.

Grasping Fashion Freedom by Carley Chan ’17

In this blog, Carley explores the notion of American freedom through her passion for fashion and consumerism to fulfill this passion. She comes to see through the research project that she has become a victim of societal expectations and norms placed on women. She hopes her blog serves as an intervention for young women to think more critically about their fashion and consumer choices. View Grasping Fashion Freedom.