Creating the Miss Porter's School Digital Archive Deborah Smith Kent State University, [email protected]
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Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies Volume 6 Article 21 2019 Lessons from the 1800s: Creating the Miss Porter's School Digital Archive Deborah Smith Kent State University, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas Part of the Archival Science Commons, Educational Leadership Commons, Secondary Education Commons, United States History Commons, and the Women's History Commons Recommended Citation Smith, Deborah (2019) "Lessons from the 1800s: Creating the Miss Porter's School Digital Archive," Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: Vol. 6 , Article 21. Available at: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol6/iss1/21 This Case Study is brought to you for free and open access by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. It has been accepted for inclusion in Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies by an authorized editor of EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale. For more information, please contact [email protected]. Lessons from the 1800s: Creating the Miss Porter's School Digital Archive Cover Page Footnote Acknowledgments The uthora is grateful to Athena Salaba, associate professor at Kent State University’s School of Library and Information Science, and Fiona York, head librarian at Miss Porter’s School for their guidance during the practicum and suggestions regarding this paper. This case study is available in Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies: https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol6/iss1/21 Smith: Creating the Miss Porter's School Digital Archive Introduction In 2018 the author conducted a master of library science practicum at Miss Porter’s School, an independent girls’ school in Farmington, Connecticut, with the goal of digitizing items from the school’s physical archive related to Sarah Porter and nineteenth-century women’s education. The internship involved more than 150 on-site hours between December 2017 and May 2018 and resulted in four digitized collections. This article describes the practicum process, the school’s collections, issues encountered specific to representation within a women’s educational archive, and recommendations for future collaboration. Educational institutions have played an important role in the collection and preservation of historical material related to women.1 However, the oldest continuously operating American women’s college, Mount Holyoke College, did not open until 1837, two centuries after Harvard University and the College of William & Mary. As women’s access has increased since the 1830s, American higher education has boomed. Prior to 1860, there were approximately 380 colleges in the United States.2 A century and a half later, as of 2014, there were approximately 4,700 degree- granting, postsecondary institutions.3 Paradoxically, while higher education overall has expanded, the number of single-sex colleges has shrunk. Most women’s colleges have closed or become coeducational in the past fifty years and many remaining single-sex institutions have considered such measures. In 2014, the Women’s College Coalition reported that there were only forty-six women’s colleges in America, down from two hundred in the 1960s.4 Taking into account colleges that were formerly single sex and are now coeducational, less than 1 percent of America’s colleges and universities may be continuous repositories of early American women’s educational material. Fortunately, there is an additional set of educational institutions that have significant archival holdings important to American history. This group includes privately run secondary schools, commonly termed “prep schools” (that is, college preparatory). Prior to 1900, most American prep schools were male, single-sex institutions founded to provide education for the sons of well-off families. New York state is home to the Emma Willard School, considered the first school to offer female students a serious, intellectually focused, private education.5 Born in Connecticut, Emma Hart Willard was a farmer’s daughter. She opened her 1 Collections specific to women’s history include several at colleges and universities, such as the Sallie Bingham Center at Duke University, the Iowa Women’s Archives at the University of Iowa, and the Seven Sisters’ College Women collaboration. Even when an archive or library is not specialized, it may have collections of importance to women’s history, such as Virginia Commonwealth University’s oral histories of Equal Rights Amendment activists, the Women’s Library collection on suffrage at the London School of Economics, and the family papers and holdings of the Alberta Women’s Memory Project, hosted by Athabasca University. For a dated, but comprehensive, list of other women’s archives and resources, see Eva Mosley, “Women in Archives: Documenting the History of America,” The American Archivist 36, no. 2 (April 1973): 216–20. 2 Thomas D. Snyder, ed., 120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrait (Washington, DC: US Department of Education Office of Educational Research and Improvement, January 1993), 71. 3 National Center for Education Statistics, “Fast Facts,” accessed January 6, 2019, https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84. 4 Women’s College Coalition, “The Truth About Women’s Colleges,” accessed January 6, 2019, https://www.womenscolleges.org/discover/reports/truth-about-womens-colleges. 5 Emma Willard School, “About Emma Hart Willard,” accessed January 6, 2019, Published by EliScholar – A Digital Platform for Scholarly Publishing at Yale, 2019 1 Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies, Vol. 6 [2019], Art. 21 first school in 1807 in Vermont before moving to New York and starting what was then known as the Troy Female Seminary. Other schools like Emma Willard’s soon opened, providing female students the scholastic opportunity denied them at elite male institutions. Miss Porter’s School is a college preparatory independent school that has operated as single-sex female since its inception.6 The school is named for its founder, Sarah Porter. Born in 1813, Porter was the third of seven children and the first daughter of congregationalist minister Noah Porter and his wife Mehitabel Meigs. Porter was educated at home in the village of Farmington, Connecticut. At age nineteen she studied informally with professors in New Haven, where her older brother Noah attended Yale University. Noah would later serve as president of Yale for fifteen years, from 1871 to 1886. Porter founded the school that bears her name in 1843. Citing economic and family reasons, she left a year later to teach in Buffalo, New York for “greater pecuniary compensation.”7 Returning to Farmington in 1847, Porter resumed her school and opened a new building in 1849. In the early years her school functioned mostly as a boarding and tutorial arrangement, with Porter the sole instructor. But a rigorous curriculum that included natural science, languages, social sciences, and music helped the school’s reputation grow and Porter hired paid instructors.8 In 1885, Porter retired from running the daily operations of the school, appointing Mary Dunning Dow as her successor. Porter’s name remained a marketable commodity and continued to appear in printed announcements about school matters, which referred to management as “Miss Porter and Mrs. Dow.” Porter’s death in 1900 came at a time when the school was run as a private family business and her will spelled out shared management between Dow and Porter’s nephew, Robert Porter Keep. Dow received a salary and a share of the operating profits. This arrangement lasted only briefly, until faced with increased facilities expenditures, Dow resigned in 1903 after a failed attempt to have school finances run by a trustee board. Dow then led a school in Briarcliff, New York while Miss Porter’s School continued under family management until 1948, when it was incorporated as a non-profit institution.9 About the Project In December 2017, the author began a semester-long internship practicum at the Miss Porter’s School M. Burch Tracy Ford Library as part of master’s in library science curriculum requirements at Kent State University’s iSchool of Library and Information Science. Early in the practicum, a survey of independent school archives revealed that few independent schools have digitized their collections (table 1).10 The reasons why less than a quarter of these https://www.emmawillard.org/page/about-emma-hart-willard. 6 Miss Porter’s School, “School History,” accessed January 6, 2019, https://www.porters.org/page/explore/school- history. 7 Nancy Davis and Barbara Donohue, Miss Porter’s School: A History (Farmington, CT: Miss Porter’s School, 1992), 2–4. 8 Connecticut Women’s Hall of Fame, “Sarah Porter,” accessed December 29, 2018, https://www.cwhf.org/inductees/education-preservation/sarah-porter. 9 Davis and Donohue, Miss Porter’s School, 29–30, 48. 10 The schools selected for this comparison were institutions that Miss Porter’s School defines as peer schools. https://elischolar.library.yale.edu/jcas/vol6/iss1/21 2 Smith: Creating the Miss Porter's School Digital Archive forty schools had digitized their collections was not studied, but could include issues related to available funding, staff time, and the condition or composition of materials within the physical collections. What was clear is that there was a unique position for digitized collections, especially for a school like Miss Porter’s—one of the oldest independent schools with archival holdings. As one of the only all-female schools operating continuously since the 1800s, the school has many documents that predate American women’s political emancipation. In December 2017, an initial archival assessment was made. The main archives room, twenty-five by fifteen feet, consists of a long work counter with three rows of shelving and several vertical file cabinets.11 Early project challenges related to the absence since 2008 of a dedicated archivist for the collections. In the intervening decade, the collection had also been moved from a historic converted home to a room in the school’s library (an ADA-accessible, climate-controlled building constructed in 2000).