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== History of the IAWA ==
The International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA) was established in 1985 as a joint program of the College of Art, Architecture, & Design, and the University Libraries at Virginia Tech. The purpose of the Archive is to document the history of women's contributions to the built environment by collecting, preserving, and providing access to the records of women's architectural organizations and the professional papers of women architects, landscape architects, designers, architectural historians and critics, journalists, and urban planners.

The IAWA began with a collecting focus on the papers of pioneering women in architecture, individuals who practiced at a time when there were few women in the field. However, the IAWA welcomes materials documenting all generations of women in architecture in order to fill serious gaps in the availability of primary source materials for architectural, women's, and social history research. 

At the time of the archives' founding, the IAWA also acted as a clearinghouse for biographical data on women architects as a strategy to counteract the lack of available resources on these women and their role in architectural history. This early focus means that many small, single-item collections, some donated and created by people other than the subjects themselves, still exist. These would be more accurately characterized as subject or reference files rather than "archival," which generally refers to collections of unpublished, original manuscript, or primary source materials created and maintained by a person or group.