About this Digital Exhibit
Title wall from the "analog" exhibition - a 100 inch banner that encorporates the typeface, wordmark, and an altered version of the 1976 edition of the board game, "What Shall I Be?"
In celebration of Susan B. Anthony’s 200th birthday and the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, River Campus Libraries’ Department of Rare Books, Special Collections, and Preservation (RBSCP) is honored to share some of our wide and varied collections related to the impact women have had on the City of Rochester. We Want More and We Will Have It: Women Running Rochester showcases the many spheres in which women have made our city run, including politics, activism, education, philanthropy, art, and beyond.
The final items for this physical exhibition were placed in cases and hung on the walls in RBSCP on Saturday, March 14, 2020. The exhibit was scheduled to open on March 16, 2020, with an opening reception sponsored by the Friends of the University of Rochester Libraries.
But the opening, along with most everything at the University of Rochester, in the city of Rochester, and indeed across the United States and beyond began to shut down due to the COVID-19 global pandemic the very week we were to open.
The pandemic has changed a great deal about how and where we work, and in fact it served as a starting point for reenvisioning this exhibition in the digital realm. This digital exhibit was started on a laptop from my home office, first with only what digital images were available, and later, as we were able to access the collections, more of the material, imaged by Lisa Wright in the Digital Scholarship Lab. Autumn Haag and I took down the exhibition in July, without it ever being viewed by the public, or being celebrated with an opening event. Though there are differences between engaging with these materials in person, and viewing a version of them online, we hope that it will inspire you and entertain you, and that you will come away with a deeper understanding of some of our collections, as well as the broad and diverse voices of women in our community.