Gifts of Speech is dedicated to preserving and creating access to speeches by influential contemporary, women from around the world. The idea for the project originated in 1989 when Liz Kent, a college librarian, was asked to help a student find a speech by Gloria Steinem. Mrs. Kent assumed it would be easy to locate a speech by Ms. Steinem, and was surprised when she could not find one in any of the resources available within her small college library. But this episode made her aware of the opportunity to find a way to make it easier for secondary school and undergraduate women to access the words of women in leadership.
In the Fall of 1996 Dr. John Jaffe, the Director of Sweet Briar College Libraries and Integrated Learning Resources, generously provided seed money to start Gifts of Speech as a web-based archive of speeches by influential, contemporary women. An address list of 85 prominent women in leadership positions around the world was compiled and letters were sent to the United States, Ireland, Kenya, Canada, England and Sri Lanka. In response to those 85 letters, 74 speeches were generously returned. These charter donations made Gifts of Speech a reality.
Volunteer Opportunities are available through the Mary Helen Cochran Library
SBC contact: Liz Kent
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PACE Experience:
This PACE project involves digitizing archival documents for the Gifts of Speech web project. Specifically, students are carefully combing the Sweet Briar College archives for speeches, poems and letters by the former presidents of Sweet Briar College. These writing are being scanned into .tiff files and then converted into PDFs.
In the spring the images will be tagged with cataloging information and assembled into a ContentDM database. The contents of the database will comprise a sub-section of the Gifts of Speech web site devoted to the history of higher education of women at Sweet Briar College. This database will be accessible via the internet.