Women's Studies Section

Association of College & Research Libraries / American Library Association

Description

Hosted at Cornell University and the University of Michigan, Making of America (MOA) is a digital library of primary sources (all items have a 19th century imprint) in American social history from the antebellum period through reconstruction. The two collections have different search engines and interfaces. Subject coverage is the same. The University of Michigan archive utilizes the same search engine as the HEARTH Archive, also included in this project and hosted at Cornell. The collection is particularly strong in the subject areas of education, psychology, American history, sociology, religion, and science and technology.

The Cornell collection currently contains 267 monograph volumes and over 100,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints while the Michigan collection contains approximately 9,500 books and 50,000 journal articles with 19th century imprints, estimated at over 3% of all American monographs published in the 19th century. All are in the form of searchable scanned images.

Women's Studies Content

There is no difference between the subject coverage at the Cornell and Michigan sites. Not surprisingly, there’s a wealth of materials here for the study of women in 19th century American society and culture -- classics like John Stuart Mill on the "Subjection of Women” and much more dealing with a variety of issues, including women and war, divorce, literature, work, suffrage, and religion; women's organizations, women writers, and various aspects of women's social and domestic lives. In many cases women are both author and subject. Ladies Repository and American Jewess are the only women's periodicals included in the collections (see Michigan collection).

Searching

The interfaces at each site differ some, but Basic and Advanced searches are available in both. In the Michigan site, click on "Other Searches in MoA" to get to the advanced search screen that is similar to Cornell's. At Cornell, one can search by author, title, and subject, but there don't seem to be many subjects related to women. Michigan has a word index rather than a subject index, in addition to author and title searching. One can also limit by date and format (book only; journals only; both). One can browse the journals (and search within a particular journal), multi-volume monographs, and a complete bibliography of books and articles in MoA. Subject index terms do not appear in the bibliographic records. However, a title word or full-text search produces many results related to women's experiences. In the Michigan collection, one can browse journal articles by author and title.

Archive Review:
Sherri Barnes
University of California, Santa Barbara