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Kadin Eserleri Kütüphanesi ve Bilgi Merkezi (The Women's Library and Information Centre Foundation, WLICF) in association with Kadir Has University organised an international conference in Istanbul entitled 'Women's Memory: The Problem of Sources' to honour the twentieth anniversary of its establishment. The conference took place from 17 to 19 April 2009. The topic was chosen because women's history sources had not been systematically discussed in Turkey before then. Some of the objectives of the symposium were: raising consciousness regarding the preservation of archives and documents about women; the development of new approaches for the classification of documents about women by transcending traditional archival methods; and the development of new ways to facilitate access to documents for scholars researching women's and gender history.
While selecting topics for the conference, the organisers had in mind a number of the problems encountered by those who do research in the Turkish archives: finding reliable methods of searching sources; difficulties experienced when trying to access information; developing strategies for the use and process of raw already accessed data; and various issues related to the research process. The conference was attended by fifty-six participants from ten different countries: the Netherlands, Syria, Bulgaria, Italy, France, Australia, Germany, the USA, Canada and Turkey. The programme included individual and group presentations related to the following topics: Research and Sources; Women's Archives and Women's Libraries; Private Archives; Classification Systems and Thesaurus; Oral History; Literature; Cinema; Art and Art Works; Using Technology; Periodicals; and Women's Organisations.
The panel 'Research and Sources' comprised two sessions and focused on problems encountered by historians working with a wide variety of documents on women's issues for the long period spanning the Ottoman Empire and the early Turkish Republic (i.e., from the sixteenth century until the 1920s). Especially interesting was the paper 'The Impact of Women's Letters on Individualisation and the Modernisation Process of Ottoman Women', presented by Ömer Delikgöz and Nazmi Ziya Sehit, about women's letters published in women's magazines and journals between 1869 and 1923. The authors evaluated the significant role letters played in the emergence of women as modern individuals and in women's attempt to position themselves in the process of Ottoman modernisation and outside the boundaries of the roles traditionally attributed to them....