History to Herstory revamping

The Guardian's Northerner Blog announces the revamping and launch today,October 7, of the website History to Herstory, which up until now was one of the few repositories online where many manuscripts of letters written by Charlotte Brontë, Ellen Nussey, etc. as well as lives and manuscripts of countless famous and not-so-famous Yorkshire women could be seen.

The quality of the images as well as the functionality of the site, however, left much to be desired, so we are sincerely hoping that this new era will keep all that was good about it - a lot - and better all that was so-so (we wish they would spell Anne Brontë correctly instead of Ann).

Funded by JISC, formerly the Joint Information Systems Committee of leading universities, which gave £42,545 and Huddersfield uni which paid £11,601, the site links every online document to the whereabouts of the original. Most are at the West Yorkshire Archive, but with substantial contributions from Huddersfield and Hull universities and the Brontë Society. Naturally, the organisers are interested in getting more.
Katy Goodrum of West Yorkshire Archives Service says:

We certainly don't want to deprive people of the ability to see the originals, but the website means you don't have to travel from half way around the world to use the material. The main thing for me is a huge amount of it is in women's own words, which is quite rare.

The notion of the website may be familiar to some researchers, because an earlier version was attempted in 2002 but worked only clunkily. It showed that demand was there, however, and the archives and Huddersfield made a persuasive case for a complete overhaul and reboot. (Martin Wainwright)

We would like to humbly wish them all the best. And we certainly recommend having a look around the site.