Female scientists from all over the United States will have their say immortalized — literally — in the Parks Library Special Collections Department.Tanya Zanish-Belcher, assistant professor of the Special Collections Department, received funding to begin collecting oral histories from women who have made contributions to science, specifically chemistry. She said the video and audio clips she collects will be added to the Archive of Women in Science and Engineering, which the Parks Library began in 1994.Zanish-Belcher said she’s collecting the information so women who have made all kinds of contributions to science will have a voice. The project will “document the histories of women in science because, a lot of times, their stories weren’t necessarily recorded or told.”A grant from the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation made the project possible, Zanish-Belcher said.”We’ve kind of been having an ongoing history project, but this grant will be targeting women and chemistry in the post-war era,” she said.Mary Ann Evans, program director of Women in Science and Engineering, said because women haven’t been written about in the past, people assume science is a man’s field. She said stories told in the oral history project will help build the confidence of young women pursuing careers in science.A major cause of gender problems in scientific fields is “people don’t think outside the box,” Evans said. This project will encourage women to learn about areas usually reserved for men.She said she plans to interview at least 30 women. Each interview will consist of one to three meetings, which could last several hours each.The video and audio tapes from the interviews will then be added to the Archive of Women in Science and Engineering. The archive is already very thorough, containing personal letters, notebooks and papers of women scientists of the 20th century, Zanish-Belcher said.Seeking out women to interview isn’t always simple. Zanish-Belcher said although “there are numerous women who have contributed a lot and are automatically on the list,” she wants to find the names and contact information of many women who weren’t so prominent.Kathleen Trahanovsky, adjunct associate professor of chemistry, is helping Zanish-Belcher by suggesting names of women and how to contact them. She said she would like to see the project focus on more than “names of women who are well-known and in high positions.” The archive will be broader if it includes women who had “dropped out, not made it, and are less well-known,” she said.Evans said women need role models with “lives more like our own” than main role models like Nobel Prize winner Marie Curie.Zanish-Belcher and Trahanovsky said women role models and mentors were very important, though few in number, to female scientists in the past.”There were a limited number of role models in those days,” Trahanovsky said.A trend among successful women scientists was “a strong mentor in childhood,” someone who pushed them and helped them continue their work, Zanish-Belcher said.She said she is planning to use the oral-history project in an outreach program to help students learn about the contributions of women in science. Zanish-Belcher said she hopes to work with several national organizations, including the Chemical Heritage Foundation, the American Chemical Society and Iota Sigma Pi, a women’s chemistry honorary society.Trahanovsky, a member of Iota Sigma Pi and former chairwoman of the Women Chemists Committee of the American Chemical Society from 1989 to 1991, said the organizations will be able to give suggestions about women to interview. She said Iota Sigma Pi has already agreed to donate many papers to the archive. Despite the limited resources, the opportunity to learn about the histories of women in science firsthand will be valuable, Trahanovsky said, especially because they didn’t really have a voice in the past. Now, thanks to the efforts of Zanish-Belcher and her colleagues, these women scientists will finally be able to tell their stories to listeners of the present and future.