Main Page
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
Quick Links and Resources
- An alphabetical listing of collections held by IAWA:
- 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:
- 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):
- 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.