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Notebooks of Memory

Aralık 2025 - Kasım 2026
İSTANBUL

The Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation (Kadın Eserleri Kütüphanesi ve Bilgi Merkezi Vakfı) is Türkiye’s first and only women’s memory centre.

The library’s debt to the hundreds of women and women’s organisations who have donated their personal archives, entrusted us with their family histories, and asked us to preserve their academic notes and writings is growing, and the responsibility as a foundation is increasing with each passing day. With this mindset, and by sparing no effort to carry this memory into the future, the Women’s Library continues its dedication to develop its institutional capacity and investments in digitisation.

With the money from the project, we can improve our technical infrastructure by buying three new computers with Windows 11 Pro already installed on them, as well as two high-resolution document scanners. These are necessary investments in the basic digital infrastructure that will keep our library and archiving services going.

The yearly rent for archival storage services taken from a professional company will be paid.

The main headlines and thematic content of the HayGin periodicals published by Armenian women between 1927 and 1931, which are held in the archive, will be translated. Research will be conducted in second-hand bookstores and foundations in an attempt to access Armenian women’s diaries.

HayGin and its daily content will allow a glimpse into the daily lives of Armenian women of that era, and an exhibition of memory will be designed, exploring their place within the newly found Republic, their expectations, and the hopes and worries that shaped their everyday lives.

The scanned HayGin periodicals will be made available via the organisation’s website.

The Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation 

The Women’s Library and Information Centre Foundation was founded on 8 March 1990 by Aslı Davaz, Füsun Akatlı, Füsun Ertuğ-Yaraş, Jale Baysal and Şirin Tekeli, with the vision of “gaining a thorough understanding of women’s history, presenting this information to researchers in a coherent manner, and preserving today’s written records for future generations” and opened its doors on 14 April 1990 in a historic building in the Haliç-Fener district of Istanbul.

The Foundation, Türkiye’s first and only woman-centred archive and library, was established with the mission of housing collections of works and documents relating to women in Türkiye, from the Ottoman period to the present day.

It houses 16 collections in the categories of Personal Archives, Women’s Organisations and Movements, Ephemera, Newspaper Clippings, Posters, Visual, Rare Books, Oral History, Books, Periodicals, Theses, Articles, Works of Art, Women Writers, Women Artists and Audio.

The Foundation contributes to the cultural landscape by organising events across dozens of different fields, such as exhibitions, panel discussions, talks, journals, book projects and workshops, with the aim of expanding and sharing its collections.

This page is published on 23 March 2026.