Women’s March Photographs and Narratives Collection now publicly available

By Nancy Heywood, Lead Archivist for Digital and Web Initiatives

In 2017, MHS undertook a collecting initiative with an open call for donations of images and accounts relating to the Women’s March for America, a series of protest marches held around the world following the 2016 U.S. presidential election.  MHS received digital files—images, narratives, and screenshots of tweets—from about a dozen donors. 

Dense crowd of people is depicted standing on Boston Common. The people in the image all face to the right as if listening to a speaker. One person holds a sign.
Boston Women’s March Participants, photograph donated by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook
Photograph primarily depicts a sign held up by a protester in a crowd of people. The sign features a woman’s symbol with an equals sign. Brick and sandstone buildings are in the background.
Boston Women’s March Participants, photograph donated by Anna Clutterbuck-Cook

Staff processed, described, and made backup copies of the digital files and donation forms, but the files and metadata remained on staff-accessible parts of the MHS network. The MHS did not have an easy way to make this entire collection accessible to researchers at the time. Today, the digital files comprising the Women’s March Photographs and Narratives collection are fully accessible to the public through the new MHS Digital Archive.  You can also find links to this collection from our library catalog.

Screenshot from the MHS Digital Archive showing Boston Women’s March participants image 06. A column of metadata is on the left. The image depicts a large crowd of people standing close to each other, two people are holding signs. A woman on the left appears to be looking at her cell phone. A woman in the middle of the photograph is looking to the left at various people and she is carrying an infant in a colorful tie-dye sling.
Boston Women’s March Participants, photograph donated by Alicia Cornwell

The ability to view the materials of the Women’s March collection is just one piece of the MHS Digital Archive. However, there is much more happening behind the scenes!

The MHS Digital Archive is the front-end access portal to MHS’s digital preservation system (Preservica).  The backend of the system allows MHS to:

  • organize and describe content
  • securely store content in the cloud with backups
  • monitor files for damage and replace them with an undamaged copy if damage is detected. (This means the system tracks the integrity of files and stores multiple copies of files. If the 0s and 1s of a file have changed, the damaged file can be replaced.)
  • ensure files are readable without needing the original application by saving them in preservation formats; for example, migrating old Word Perfect files to PDFs

MHS has been collecting, preserving and making accessible historically significant materials for over 230 years and with the rollout of the digital preservation system, we are now well-positioned to handle new accessions comprised of hybrid collections (physical and digital) or digital only. We will also be able to efficiently manage any future collecting initiative with an open call for donations of digital files and make them accessible.

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