Thanks for your Help!: Women’s History Month Summary

Throughout the month of March, the Smithsonian Institution Archives posted about interesting women from our collections in honor of Women’s History Month. Last month we asked for your help in identifying a new group of women we added to the Flickr Commons in honor of Women’s History Month. Well, you did that and then some!

While there are still quite a few mystery folks remaining in our “unidentified” set (which you can still help us ID, even after Women’s history month!), you did help us identify the mystery profession of one female scientist in that bunch, and many of you completed some detailed research on lesser known women uploaded to our “Science Service” set and cross-posted to our “Women in Science” set during March.

A few of your nifty finds? Some of you provided obituaries (a sad, but helpful way to learn more about individuals’ lives and their careers); added our images to Wikipedia to flesh out entries there; and provided contemporary images of some of the individuals in our Science Service set. Others got very specific. For example, Marisa Bourgoin helped us discover that Marian G. Hogan (sp.) was actually Marion Geraldine Hogan Ingram, the president of Weather Services, Inc. in Boston, Massachusetts (not Wealter Services as we’d thought before from the difficult-to-read photo inscription). Though I haven’t been able to find out much more about Hogan, it seems as though she might be a 1946 MIT alum, and was a private meteorologist. And Brenda Anderson completed detailed family tree research and fleshed out great bio detail on a handful of our images (like this one and this one).

And finally, a special shout-out to Penny Richards, our Flickr friend and scholar extraordinaire. Her contributions over the last month are too numerous to count, but here are a few highlights:

• Helping us correct erroneous metadata/tags on an image
• Providing research resources for subjects
• Adding lots of bio information
• Guest blogging about many of our “Women in Science” images on Scientopia
• And my favorite find in this year’s Women’s History Month Flickr Commons photos—Penny discovered a book inscription between two women who appear in the same photo, and then in all of her spare time added this photo to a purse (she designs “upcycled handbags” that feature images from the Flickr Commons)!

To Penny, Brenda, Marisa, and everyone else—thank you! Your contributions make every day a wonderful discovery on the Flickr Commons.  I’ve learned so much from you over the past month about the incredible women and men in our Science Service collection, and I’ve been inspired to do my own research. Everyone at the Archives looks forward to continued collaboration, and in fact, we’ll be asking you about what we can do to make your Smithsonian Flickr Commons experience more exciting and rewarding. Stay tuned for more.