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

The data used to seed this instance is migrated from the IAWA Biographical Database (IAWAdb), a now defunct resource that anyone could add information to, which was then moderated on the back-end by an account administrator. Although the IAWAdb had long been minimally functional and difficult to update, in 2023, an institutionally mandated security upgrade to the software running the database would have required significant time and staffing resources to maintain usability. After the data was exported, the IAWAdb was retired with the understanding that the data would eventually be migrated to a new platform.

Divergence Between Physical Collections and Data

Because the original data source included women architects regardless of whether they were represented in the physical IAWA collections, the Wikibase may contain some entries for women who have no corresponding archival representation among IAWA collections.

Data Quality

Due to its crowdsourced nature, IAWAdb records and data varied drastically in their completeness, authority, and overall quality. Misspellings and name variants also resulted in duplication of some records. As part of the cleanup process, the exported data has been de-duplicated, names have been standardized and reconciled with existing authority records, and dead source links have been removed.

Using the IAWA Wikibase

This section will grow once the data model is fleshed out and the instance is populated with data. It will include guidance on searching and querying the Wikibase.

SPARQL tutorial:

SPARQL query example:

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.

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.

Getting started

• Configuration settings list
• MediaWiki FAQ
• MediaWiki release mailing list
• Localise MediaWiki for your language
• Learn how to combat spam on your wiki