In a blog post last week, the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Archives and Manuscript Department announced “the Meda Chesney-Lind Papers have been processed and available online in ArchivesSpace.”

The announcement is expected to be included in a UH News email blast later this week.

This collection contains the research, academic work, and professional services of Meda Chesney-Lind, the former Director of the Women’s Studies Program and Emeritus professor of the Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Hawai‘i at M?noa. She is nationally recognized for her work on delinquent girls, incarcerated women, girls in gangs, and women and crime.

There’s a lot more, but I’ll let you read it yourself.

Meda retired on June 1, 2020, after more than 50 years of continuous employment at the University of Hawaii beginning as a graduate teaching assistant in 1969.

The project that led to the processing and organizing of her personal and professional paper started with a blog post here on June 3, 2021–“Throwback Thursday: Women’s Studies at UH.”

That post described “the old filing cabinets that line one wall in the office, 16 drawers filled with decades of academic papers of all kinds, class lists, teaching notes, collections of published articles related to her various academic interests and specialties, conference notes and reminders, administrative forms required for past trips, clipping files on university and campus issues, correspondence from the days back when messages were on paper and sent via the post office, anything and everything reflecting her long tenure with the university and the broader world of academia.”

That post, which briefly described Meda’s years in Women’s Studies at UH, caught the eye of an archivist at the UH Manoa Library, who called it to the attention of Helen Wong Smith, Archivist for University Records, who send me a one sentence inquiry: “Would Meda be interested in donating her collection to the University Archives?”

And that started the ball rolling. When we finally got around to cleaning out Meda’s longtime campus office this past summer, we packed up five tall bookshelves worth of books to be given away, and did a rough sort through her papers to find those of potential interest to UH, which were boxed and carted off to the library.

And this collection is the result. It’s a cool way to leave a mark, along with her many published books and journal articles, and her select group of students who have gone on to their own university careers.

This is one of the photos featured in the announcement, showing Meda with Eileen Anderson, Honolulu mayor from 1981-1985, when she was named to the Honolulu County Commission on the Status of Women.