"...the radical potential of digital tools for special collections is they let everyone use rare books and manuscripts. They let everyone read them and destroy them and remake them and carry them into the future. But we haven’t reached that radical openness yet."
—Sarah Werner, 2016 RBMS Plenary talk: "Looking for a Radically Open Digital Landscape"

Working Women of the East is a digital resource, but it is also an experiment in radical digital access.

The pamphlet series Truzhenitsa Vostoka is an important primary source for the study of the Soviet Union’s multiethnic empire, the status of non-Russian women in the Soviet Union, and the efforts of the Zhenotdel (the Women’s department of the Communist Party). The series is also rare—only a handful of institutions in the world have copies. Moreover, the set held at Houghton Library is extremely fragile due to the poor quality of paper used by the publisher and as a result of its portable, ephemeral history. Many of the front and rear covers have detached from the pamphlets’ signatures and the edges of the browned pages flake off as you turn them. For this reason, researchers cannot consult the pamphlets in the library's reading room without "curatorial permission." The tension between preservation and access is a widely-debated and fraught topic in the Special Collections field, but no one enjoys serving as the arbiter of who should and should not have access to scarce primary sources.

Upon their arrival, the library immediately digitized the pamphlets so anyone could access them without having to visit the reading room and asking for permission. Next, they were OCR'ed (i.e. Optical Character Recognition, a process that converts images into text) so that researchers could download and keyword search the text. Afterward, we began to wonder if our job was done or if there was more we could do to make this periodical available to say, non-Russian speakers for example, or faculty who might want to incorporate the pamphlets in a lesson plan. How might people who aren't aware of its existence find it? If we wanted to put Truzhenitsa Vostoka into as many virtual hands as possible, what else might we do?

As an answer to Sarah Werner’s call, the Working Women of the East project aims to liberate the pamphlets from the library catalog and empower patrons with varied interests and skills to read, explore, analyze, download, repurpose, and remake the series on their own terms.