Women's Studies Serials

A Quarter-Century of Development

Kristin H Gerhard

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9780789013316
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317957539
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Women in History
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Women's Studies Serials: A Quarter-Century of Development examines the history, growth, and present status of women's studies collections available in the United States and around the world. This text investigates the accessibility to women's studies periodicals, how they are used and by whom, and identifies areas where further research is needed to help collection managers and librarians make the best selection decisions for their serials collections. Women's Studies Serials will help you choose serials that meet the needs of your patrons and that comply with the limitations of your budget. Offering you charts, tables, and statistical data, Women's Studies Serials covers many topics that will help you build a thorough and accessible women's studies collection or renovate an existing collection, including:

• the problems, influences, and expectations involved in women's studies faculty's daily work with magazines and journals
  
• choosing the best CD-Rom products for women's studies research based on cost, coverage, content, and recommendations for acquisition
  
• techniques and insights for teaching cataloging in an interdisciplinary, dynamic, and evolving information environment
  
• examining academic women's studies serials on the World Wide Web and determining whether they are helpful to students and faculty
  
• suggestions that may alleviate the inadequacies of subject description and access to current periodical literature concerning African-American women and Latinas in the United States
  
• how women's studies serials published in Ireland are adding support and recognition to the discipline of women's studies
  
• examining popular women's periodicals in the Popular Culture Collection at Bowling Green
  State University and how they help reveal and document the history of women's roles in society
  
• the management and collection methods of the International Centre and Archives of the Women's Studies Movement located in the NetherlandsProviding you with information on how other academic libraries choose their collection material, Women's Studies Serials will help you determine what journals in your library are most widely read and if they are meeting the informational and research needs of faculty and students. The information in Women's Studies Serials will help make your women's studies serials current, cost-efficient, and relevant to your patrons'needs.

WOMEN’S STUDIES REFERENCE SOURCE

From Zero to Four: A Review of Four New Women’s Studies CD–ROM Products

Ruth Dickstein MA, MLS

Marcia Evans, MLS

Lisa German, MLS

Jessica Grim, MLS

Sandra A. River

Ruth Dickstein is a social sciences librarian and Women’s studies specialist, University of Arizona Library, PO Box 210055, Tucson, AZ 85721–0055.

Marcia Evans is a nonbook/serials catalog librarian, The University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL 35487–0266.

Lisa German is an acting acquisitions librarian and Asst. Professor of Library Administration, University of Illinois Library, 1408 W. Gregory Drive, Urbana, IL 61801.

Jessica Grim is Associate Librarian, Oberlin College Library, Oberlin, OH 44074.

Sandra A. River is Current Periodicals/Microforms Librarian, Texas Tech University Library, Lubbock, TX 79409–0002.

SUMMARY. With the recent addition to the market of four new CD-ROM products focusing on women’s studies research, a long-standing gap in electronic access has finally been closed. Yet librarians in the position of having to select those that best suit the needs of their institution may find this sudden wealth to be confusing. How do these products compare? Which are full-text, which provide abstracts, what is the scholarly vs. popular content? This article attempts to answer some of these questions by examining the four new products, comparing them for factors such as cost, coverage, content, and software, and concluding with recommendations for acquisition. [Article copies available for a fee from The Haworth Document Delivery Service: 1-800-342-9678, E-mail address: [email protected]]

KEYWORDS. Women’s studies CD-ROMs, Women’s studies, CD-ROMs, electronic indexes, evaluation of CD-ROMs

INTRODUCTION

Long after electronic indexes were available to facilitate research in most fields, students and scholars working in women’s studies still needed to rely on print sources. Although there was some coverage of women’s studies journals in electronic indexes which covered multiple disciplines, such as Expanded Academic Index, Social Sciences Index and Humanities Index, as well as in field-specific indexes like America: History & Life, Sociofile, and Religion Index, there was no electronic resource focusing solely on women’s studies. The traditional print sources, Women Studies Abstracts, Women’s Studies Index, and Studies on Women Abstracts, supplemented by sources such as Women of Color and Southern Women and Feminist Periodicals, were the mainstay for women’s studies scholars. Then, in the space of just two years, that all changed dramatically. As the title of this paper suggests, there are now four separate CD-ROM resources available for research in women’s studies. Where there was a dearth of options there is now a glut. Librarians, working with tight budgets and competing demands, are having to make decisions about which of these resources, or combination of them, will best suit the needs of their institutions. In an effort to help facilitate this decision-making process, this paper reviews and compares the four indexes, two which include bibliographic citations only: Women’s Studies on Disc (WSD) and Women’s Resources International (WRI), and two which are full-text: Women “R” (WR), and Contemporary Women’s Issues (CWI). Because bibliographic and the full-text databases are quite different in format, we will be discussing them in separate sections. First, we will discuss the two resources which include bibliographic citations only, and then the two which are full-text.

For each of the four products we will give descriptive information including cost, type of citation, search vocabulary used, and limiting features (see Appendices A and B for these charts), a discussion of contents and special features, information based on comparative searches conducted in each of the four, comments on the search software, and notes on what ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Women’s Studies Serials: A Quarter-Century of Development
• Usage of Women’s Studies Serials
• Women’s Studies Reference SOURCES
• Content and Access Issues for Women’s Studies Serials
• International Views of Women’s Studies Serials
• Index