Goal
To heighten awareness of and promote access to freely available non-women’s
studies open access, digital archives that may be of interest to women’s
studies researchers.
In 2004, the members of the Electronic Resources and Access Committee
of the Women’s Studies Section of the Association of College and Research
Libraries discussed the need for a website that helped web-users wade
through the ever-increasing primary resource material being digitized
and made freely available online. While such collections that were devoted
to women’s studies material were easily accessible, the committee agreed
that it was more difficult to find equally relevant sources that were
housed in digital archives whose primary focus was not women’s studies.
Process
The first step was to identify a list of potential archives to be reviewed.
The archives to be reviewed had to conform to four criteria:
- freely available, online resource
- non-women’s studies specific resource
- at least 50% of the content primary source material
- at least 50% of the content in English
The next step was to develop a standard form for reviewing each archive.
This review form has transformed over the life of the project as additional
relevant and significant information is discovered, but its primary goal
has remained constant: to give a brief but detailed description which
allows a user to:
- know whether or not a given source will likely contain relevant information
- immediately identify relevant and like archives through the use of
controlled subject headings
- understand how to effectively search the archive
The Reviews
The reviews reflect the information that was available at the time the
archive was reviewed. Each review includes the following information for
the respective archive:
- Types of primary sources with women's studies content
- Subjects with women's studies content
- List of digital collections, when applicable
- Date range of the primary source materials
- Status - is the archive ongoing or complete? If ongoing, what is the
frequency of updates?
- Publisher
- URL
- Latest Date of Search for Review Purposes
- Brief description of the archive as a whole
- Brief description of sources of interest to women's studies
- Searching tips, searching quirks, and other information including:
- Is truncation allowed? Are searches truncated automatically?
- What, if any, boolean operators are allowed?
- Is proximity searching available?
- Is phrase searching available?
- Are there help screens? How extensive?-
- What, if any, controlled vocabulary is used?
- Do results show keywords searched in context?
Organization
Archives included in the project are listed on the Home
page which includes a link to each archive as well as a link to each
review.
Subject access to materials identified for women's studies is available
thorough the Subject
Index
Materials identified for women's studies are accessible also by Primary
Source Type of the material.
Kristi Palmer
Indiana University - Purdue University
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