A huge milestone achieved today: all of the extant minutes from the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore meetings from 1890-1920 have been transcribed and published to the online WLCB archive!

You can see them in all their glory right here.

This is the work of 14 Loyola students, 10 Baltimore Friends School seniors, 2 volunteers, and yours truly, undertaken over the past 18 months. Over 3000 pages of manuscript, the vast majority handwritten.

As an added bonus, Marina from the Spring 2018 Aperio seminar has been working for me as a research assistant this fall and has begun annotating the names of the members in the minutes, so that we can read them referred to by their actual names, not as their husbands’ wives. She was able to complete the minutes through the first half of 1903. This work helps to restore these Club members to their full humanity. And it also makes the archive much more easily searchable. (1903-1920 still need to be done; I may see if there’s a willing volunteer next semester. Let me know if that person is you!)

Transcribing the minutes is also important because it enables anyone using the site to use keyword searching to find the topics of Club discussions, the names of the members, and titles of works they discussed. Anyone who has done research in manuscript archives knows how huge this is. If you haven’t done this kind of research, you can use your imagination for about 8 seconds and you will quickly understand.

Three cheers for the transcribers!