About the Libraries: Libraries & Digital Centers: Margery Somers Foster Center:
About the Foster Center

The Rutgers University Libraries and Douglass College are collaborating to highlight the university's pre-eminence in the area of women's education, leadership, and research with the creation of a new center in the Mabel Smith Douglass Library and naming it in honor of the fifth dean of Douglass College, Margery Somers Foster. Headed by Kayo Denda, the Margery Somers Foster Center integrates scholarship, instruction, and service, combining the best of traditional resources with new technologies. It links faculty and students across all three campuses with current research interests/projects, with research databases created by our faculty and others, and with print and digital archives. As the Center's resources become available on the Internet, faculty and students from around the world will be able to use them for teaching, research, and arts activities.

Supported by internationally recognized, award-winning faculty across all campuses contributing to scholarship on gender and women in all fields, with outstanding scholars mentoring Douglass women for leadership roles, and with a top AAU library system setting the standard for technological sophistication, the college and university, together with the members of the Institute for Women's Leadership, are perfectly positioned to develop this Center. The Margery Somers Foster Center is positioning itself to be unparalleled among other centers and archives for women in several important ways:

It will further women's scholarship and leadership here and elsewhere by contributing to an internationally available archive of information to be used to advance women's issues and leadership potential. For example, the creation of Center for American Woman and Politics (CAWP), or the planned database on women and work.

It will provide a technology-rich learning environment and "community center" for student/faculty collaboration with new media and primary resources on gender and women across all disciplines. For example: the nationally recognized and award-winning Mary H. Dana Women Artists Series at Douglass Library can be the basis for new multimedia projects including digital images of artwork and video interviews of women artists that can be incorporated into the Douglass College Mission course, "Shaping a Life".

It will provide a physical environment for women to use the most advanced technology to enhance their research and instructional experience, and prepare students for careers beyond the university. For example, the Center will have digital scanners, video equipment, editing software, and projection equipment in demonstration rooms, and small-group work/study rooms.

And it will create new opportunities for outreach to the K-12 community by capitalizing on the resources created by Rutgers faculty and students in all media using the Center; for example, summer institutes that provide opportunities for collaboration on developing new curriculum in conjunction with our outstanding women's studies faculty using the Center's resources.