Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum Launches Discoverability Lab To Celebrate Women’s History Month 2025

The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum announces its program of innovative history resources and events to commemorate Women’s History Month. These include the launch of the Discoverability Lab, a women’s history Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon and a celebration of the new quarter honoring Girl Scouts of the USA founder Juliette Gordon Low. Building on the success of last year’s programming, including the launch of the museum’s inaugural and award-winning digital exhibition, “Becoming Visible: Bringing American Women Into Focus,” the museum’s upcoming initiatives will continue to illuminate and celebrate the vital contributions of women to American history.

"Women have been making history for centuries, but those accomplishments have not always been recorded or digitized in a way that makes them findable,” said Elizabeth C. Babcock, director of the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum. “The Discoverability Lab will help solve this problem by making women’s history more visible.”

Details about the Discoverability Lab, Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon and Juliette Gordon Low Quarter programs are below:

• Discoverability Lab | Launching March 1: As search engines, algorithms and artificial intelligence revolutionize access to information, the quality of the data underlying online searches matters. Women’s contributions to American history are often overlooked because their names, activities and accomplishments are not recorded in a way that is discoverable in the databases on which people rely. The Discoverability Lab is a cooperative effort among historians, technologists and the public to leverage emerging technologies to bring women’s history from the margins into the mainstream. Using data science, crowdsourcing and museum collections, the Discoverability Lab helps make women’s history visible in order to tell a more complete American story. The new web platform will feature the latest experiments and research, including the museum’s collaboration with the Human Computer Project, an initiative to tell the stories of women in computing fields, and their impact on American society, founded by Hidden Figures author Margot Lee Shetterly.
• Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon | March 25: Only 20% of biographies in English-language Wikipedia are about women. The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum is helping to change this with a Wikipedia Edit-a-Thon to edit and create Wikipedia articles about American women who have been made visible through exhibitions, publications and programs across the Smithsonian. New editors who have never contributed to Wikipedia before will receive training. This event is presented with support from Wikimedia D.C., and free registration is available on the museum’s website.
• Juliette Gordon Low Quarter Celebration at the National Postal Museum | March 26: The American Women Quarters Program is a four-year program in partnership with the U.S. Mint that celebrates the accomplishments and contributions made by American women. The program’s upcoming installment includes a quarter of Juliette Gordon Low, founder of Girl Scouts of the USA and advocate for the empowerment of women and girls. The National Postal Museum will host a commemorative event from 4–6 p.m. March 26 to celebrate this quarter release; more information is available on the museum’s website.

About the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum 

The Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum expands the story of America through the often-untold accounts and accomplishments of women—individually and collectively—to better understand our past and inspire our future. Through new scholarship and innovative exhibitions and online experiences, storytelling and participation, the museum inspires the next generation. The legislation creating the Smithsonian American Women’s History Museum passed Dec. 27, 2020, and the museum is working with Congress to finalize a site for the physical building on the National Mall, even as it continues to advance history education and scholarship. Website: womenshistory.si.edu.

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