Women’s History Month

Paving the Way for Women in the Sciences with Sally Ride

By Jennifer Albers-Smith

I was a Computer Science major for a couple years at the University of Michigan (before declaring an English and Sociology double major) and participated in the Women in Science & Engineering (WISE) residence program. One of the events on our radar was the Sally Ride Science Festival that took place on North Campus. Each year, I was amazed as the campus was swarmed with hundreds of children. The festival, which still takes place each year at colleges across the United States, it is a fun-filled day of science projects, workshops, and experiences for middle schoolers.

This festival struck me in particular because no one had encouraged me (outside of my chemist father and pharmacist mother) to turn my interest in science into a career. There weren’t programs for young girls (or at least none in my area) trying to promote scientific careers in a fun way. And as a pioneer for STEM education and the first American woman in space, Sally Ride deserves a shout-out for this month’s focus on Women’s History Month.

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A Grown Woman’s Tribute to Little House on the Prairie

By Jennifer Albers-Smith

If any of you happened to use Google on February 10, you would have seen the customized home page for Laura Ingalls Wilder’s birthday. Dead for 58 years, her name is still synonymous with Westward Expansion and the nineteenth century prairie. All these years later, her literature continues to have a life of its own. After all, few go through childhood without reading Little House on the Prairie.

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I loved the Little House books as a child (and now as an adult) and read them all several times. Her writing took me to another time and place, a place that I found fascinating, especially during a time when the game Oregon Trail was immensely popular on floppy disk.  And don’t forget the Little House TV series! When my parents and I traveled West on a two-week vacation, we stopped along the way at some of the places the Ingalls family stopped; we even saw the giant wagon ruts in Wyoming.

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Celebrating Many Women with Many Resources

By Robert Lisiecki

March marks the time for us to celebrate Women’s History Month. During this month, we’ll remember and celebrate the various women throughout history who have made lasting impacts on the world as we know it today. And boy, there are a lot of women to celebrate.

The women we recognize come from different eras and backgrounds—each presenting her own unique story. When thinking about the uniqueness that each story presents, I began thinking about some of our resources. Each resource is crafted and created to provide a unique functionality and utility to tell its own story.

Today, I’d like to reflect on five different women from five different resources, highlighting some high-level information. Some women are more well-known while others, to me at least, are less. I hope this post can serve as an example on how different resources can impact research. Let’s go.

Five Impactful Women from Five Different Resources

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