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Welcome to the '''International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA)''' wikibase instance. In its physical form the IAWA is a set of archival collections held at Virginia Tech by the department of Special Collections and University Archives. The IAWA was founded in 1985 as a joint partnership between the University Libraries and the College of Art, Architecture, and Design. The woman who conceived of an architectural archives devoted to women-identifying practitioners was Milka Bliznakov (1927-2010), a Bulgarian-born architect and professor at Virginia Tech. | Welcome to the '''International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA)''' wikibase instance. In its physical form the IAWA is a set of archival collections held at Virginia Tech by the department of Special Collections and University Archives. The IAWA was founded in 1985 as a joint partnership between the University Libraries and the College of Art, Architecture, and Design. The woman who conceived of an architectural archives devoted to women-identifying practitioners was '''Milka Bliznakov''' (1927-2010), a Bulgarian-born architect and professor at Virginia Tech. | ||
This Wikibase transforms data migrated from a defunct PHP database called IAWAdb, a crowdsourced biographical database on women architects that allowed for rudimentary data entry. The data exported from this system has been normalized, de-duplicated, | This Wikibase transforms data migrated from a defunct PHP database called IAWAdb, a crowdsourced biographical database on women architects that allowed for rudimentary data entry. The data exported from this system has been normalized, de-duplicated, | ||
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== History of the IAWA == | == 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. | |||
Originally, the IAWA also acted as a clearinghouse for biographical data on women architects, meaning that there still exist many small, single-item collections, some donated and created by people other than the subjects themselves. 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. | |||
== Resources == | == Resources == | ||
Revision as of 18:37, 20 March 2026
Welcome to the International Archive of Women in Architecture (IAWA) wikibase instance. In its physical form the IAWA is a set of archival collections held at Virginia Tech by the department of Special Collections and University Archives. The IAWA was founded in 1985 as a joint partnership between the University Libraries and the College of Art, Architecture, and Design. The woman who conceived of an architectural archives devoted to women-identifying practitioners was Milka Bliznakov (1927-2010), a Bulgarian-born architect and professor at Virginia Tech.
This Wikibase transforms data migrated from a defunct PHP database called IAWAdb, a crowdsourced biographical database on women architects that allowed for rudimentary data entry. The data exported from this system has been normalized, de-duplicated,
This instance is currently in development and will no doubt grow as its data model is finalized and it's populated with items.
Original Dataset and Project History
Divergence Between Physical Collections and Data
Data Quality
Leveraging Linked Data
Using the IAWA Wikibase
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.
Originally, the IAWA also acted as a clearinghouse for biographical data on women architects, meaning that there still exist many small, single-item collections, some donated and created by people other than the subjects themselves. 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.
Resources
- An alphabetical listing of collections held by IAWA: https://guides.lib.vt.edu/iawa/collections
- This resource lists fully processed (arranged and described) archival collections, including brief biographical content, scope of collection, material description, manuscript identifier (Ms####-###), and a link to a full finding aid.
- Virginia Tech University Libraries IAWA Digital Library Platform: https://iawa.lib.vt.edu/
- This platform contains collections of digitized images of physical records from a subset of IAWA collections. It is a relatively small selection of the total number of materials held by Virginia Tech.
- Archival Resources of the Virginias (ARVAS): https://arvasarchive.org/
- This resource is an aggregator that consolidates finding aid search across institutions throughout Virginia and West Virginia. As such it facilitates search for a wide array of rare, archival, and/or manuscript material across many organizations.