Janice E. Ruth is the chief of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, where she previously held positions as the assistant chief, manuscript specialist in American women’s history, writer-editor, reference librarian, and processing technician. Co- curator of the recent Library of Congress exhibition Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote, Ms. Ruth was a contributing author to the exhibition’s companion book of the same title (2019) and one of the authors of American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women’s History and Culture in the United States (2001), Women Who Dare: Women of the Suffrage Movement (2006), and several Library of Congress Web sites relating to women’s history. Ms. Ruth writes and speaks frequently on women’s history and archival topics, and she represents the Library of Congress on the National Historical Publications and Records Commission. She is a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists and served on the SAA committees that developed the Encoded Archival Description (EAD) international standard for electronic finding aids and authored the first EAD Tag Library and EAD Application Guidelines. She holds an M.L.S. and an M.A. in American history from the University of Maryland.
