About Support Documents

What are supporting documents? And how are they handled?

Curious minds want to know… the Project says they want all the supporting documents a woman is willing to provide. What are they? And what does the Project do with them?

Just what are support docs?

By far, the most common support documents are photographs. Photos often cover the scope of the woman's life, including pictures of parents, relatives, the house where they grew up, and friends. Women often include graduation certificates, articles about them that appeared in the paper, and award certificates. What else? We often get vitae, copies of articles the woman has authored, papers they wrote in a class, etc. Occasionally, we get ephemera like books, video and audio recordings, and even an occasional piece of clothing.

What does the Project do with these items?

For the past few years, we've used scanners to give us quality digital copies of all the photos. For the first decade of the project, we'd have the originals photo copied. Not only was that expensive, but photos would lose some quality (how much depended on the photo copy machine) and in the end, we ended up scanning those photo copies. Scanning directly saves us time and money, and results in a much better product in the end. A high-quality scan can be cropped, enlarged or reduced as needed. All originals are returned to the woman. We keep only the scans/photo copies.

When we get to the stage where we are laying out all the photos to be printed and included in the final copy of a Herstory, we are sometimes able to take a bit of extra time and effort to improve damaged photos. Here are a few examples. We don't have the time or resources to work with every photo, but for ones that strike us as special, we make the time.

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Note sent to the OLOHP: What you have done is so important that I think even you don’t understand it. This will have a life of its own and be around way after we are gone. To have thought this up, seen the need, and assumed the effort to get it done is phenomenal. I really do salute you.

TF says: The women that the OLOHP has brought to us have lived remarkable lives, often solitary and private, and we are far richer for knowing these women, their struggles and their passion.