Author: Barbara Williams Ellertson
This post has been shared from the BASIRA Blog. Check out the original post.
“BASIRA is not just about records in a database: it is also about building communities of shared interest. Thus, when several members of the faculty of Wellesley College expressed an interest in uses of BASIRA in their humanities curriculum, members of the BASIRA team were pleased and energized. Thanks to an invitation from Drs. Yoon Lee, Martha McNamara, and Bailey Ludwig, Barbara Williams Ellertson visited the Wellesley campus on 4 February 2025 to speak about the potential for classroom use of the database. Her formal presentation, given to a group of faculty and students in the college’s Founder’s Hall, included such topics as: a brief history of and rationale for developing BASIRA; research case studies; technical infrastructure; popular appeal as a connection to art appreciation; sample classroom exercises; potential social media engagement.
Support for Barbara’s visit was provided by a Mellon Foundation grant in the Humanities for All Times program which has enabled a broad-reaching initiative at Wellesley, ‘Transforming Stories, Spaces, Lives: Rethinking Inclusion and Exclusion Through the Humanities.’ TSSL has been designed to foster humanities-based critical thinking, reflective scholarship, and civic engagement among students and faculty at Wellesley and beyond. To learn more, see https://blogs.wellesley.edu/tssl/about-tssl/
During her visit, Barbara was also able to visit the Book Arts Lab, where she met Director Katherine Ruffin, and admired several ambitious student projects. The Davis Art Museum on campus has been undergoing a re-installation process; it was a special treat to be part of a “preview” tour of the collection conducted by Curators Alicia Bruce and Nicole Berlin. Staff from the Special Collections department of the Wellesley Library were also with us on this tour: everyone enjoyed making connections between works of art in the Davis Museum and images in the BASIRA database.
Classroom use has always been one of the primary development goals for the BASIRA Project. Please let us know if you have used the database in course work, and, if so, whether you’ve identified ways we could support such initiatives.”
Image: Katherine Ruffin and Barbara Williams Ellertson in the Wellesley College Book Arts Lab.