We're Here, We're Queer

Libraries are a social equalizer—they are for everyone. This is why we celebrate Banned Books Week, September 25–October 2, 2004. It's also why we have so many titles to celebrate each year. As librarians, one of our fundamental principles is to take seriously the information needs of the diverse groups we serve. But it's a principle that has been difficult to carry out, at least until recently.

The databases here provide a good look at the evolution of the women's movement and the gay rights movement thanks to the extensive retrospective coverage. Among them are Gender Studies Database, GenderWatch, and GLBT Life (the Gerritsen Collection is in a class by itself, serving as an extremely significant social history resource). But while there is historical information, the larger focus is on current themes. Public and academic librarians alike will find this material more relevant than ever. After all, in the past several months we've seen thousands of women march on Washington to express dissatisfaction with the federal government's commitment to their rights and welfare; mayors and ministers nationwide are lining up against judicial systems on the issue of gay marriage; and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is arguably the funniest and most truly generous show on television.

The majority of the databases here do more than point at research and writing relating to gender issues. Because so much of this literature was—and usually remains—outside of mainstream library collections, producers are compelled to deliver full-text content.

Content: Gender and women's studies programs, as well as school and public libraries, will benefit from the American Women's History online reference database. Initially unveiled several years ago as American Women's History Online Encyclopedia, the bulk of the content—some 2050+ biographies of historical and contemporary figures—is drawn from current editions of nearly 50 of Facts On File's women's studies reference products. Content includes descriptions of organizations, events, court cases, and historical themes and topics. Thirty-eight topical subject areas provide access to approximately 278 entries on issues such as abortion, birth control, and reproductive rights; crime, violence, and sexual abuse; family, marriage and divorce; lesbian and gay studies; politics, law, and government; racial issues; and the women's liberation movement. The database also includes 256 primary source documents.

Textual material is further supplemented with 500 historical images and an extensive time line. A small selective menu of women's history web resources completes the package.

American Women's History's content is organized to facilitate instruction as well as student research by making related essays, biographical material, and visual aids readily accessible via hot-linking. An update of the database is planned for this summer.

Searchability: Users have numerous choices when entering the American Women's History database. Center-stage allows the Browse/Search Contents option of the six main categories of Biographies, Subject Entries, Primary Sources, Timeline, Image Gallery, and Maps and Charts. Prominently positioned on the left-hand frame is a quick search template with a link to an advanced search option below it. The left-hand frame also lists the six main categories with a check box feature, allowing a quick search of one or more of the categories. Web Links and Further Information (which includes Credits, Selected Bibliographies, and Acknowledgements) are arranged below the primary search options. This frame repeats throughout the database, helpful for quick navigation or a search strategy change. Regardless of the search option or category selected, links to Related Biographies, Subjects, Documents, and Images are included on all search results pages.

The Basic Search mode produced results from all sections of the database, with linked results listed by category. With the Advanced Search option, researchers can browse by broad content area or search by word or phrase, using a "full-text" or more precise "title/heading" search.

A quick search on the phrase presidential elections with all six categories selected, found 17 Biographies, three Subject Entries, 13 Primary Sources, three Timeline Entries, and three Maps and Charts. Results included a biography of Elizabeth Monroe; excerpts from The Blue Book, a collection of essays published in 1917 by the National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company; and a table representing "Reported Voter Registration and Voter Turnout among Females."

An additional Advanced Search option appears on the top navigation bar after a quick search is conducted, although we could not find any reference to it in the online Help notes, nor could we replicate it without performing a quick search. Here users can truly focus on a specific topic via a search template with pull-down menus.

Searching through the Main Menu options provides different access points in different sections of the database. Content may be browsed by the broad topical areas listed above, by subtopic, or by time period within those content areas. Biographies add alphabetical as well as occupational access.

Although the search and browse capabilities of American Women's History are impressive enough, we did find a few flaws. We kept losing the summary results page, ending up re-creating our search strategy. The navigation links at the top of the results page did not consistently work, and the browser's navigation was frustrating as well.

Price: Pricing is determined by FTE for schools and by number of cardholders for public libraries. Prices start at $355 for schools and include unlimited usage within the institution and remote access. A free 30-day trial is available.

Who Needs It? American Women's History is ideally suited to support women's studies research in public as well as school and academic library settings. The high-quality and wide-ranging content helps to organize women's issues into an easy and flexible format for all interested users. Having so much variety of premium material in one package is a real strength of this product. Future updates should improve minor navigation flaws.

Content: Contemporary Women's Issues (CWI) is carefully crafted to meet the needs of researchers interested in studying any one of the broad range of subjects associated with the multinational, multidisciplinary field of women's studies. CWI draws for its content on more than 2000 sources—books, journals, newsletters, research reports, and fact sheets—from 250 different organizations. With full-text coverage approaching 100 percent, the database is comprised of some 35,000 records culled from mainstream journals and magazines, alternative media outlets, grass-roots political and social groups, nongovernmental research institutions, government agencies, and international organizations.

Subject coverage includes domestic violence, pay equity, reproductive rights, employment and the workplace, legal status, family life, and health and sexuality. The earliest records in CWI date back to 1990, with "comprehensive" coverage beginning in 1992. The database is updated weekly and is currently experiencing a growth spurt with the addition of 10,000 to 12,000 records a year.

Searchability: CWI's single search mode looks a little ungainly with all the system's capabilities packed together onto one screen, but the various searchable elements are clearly labeled, and most searchers should negotiate this interface with little effort. A single full-text search box is situated at the top center, with the command "Use Boolean Operators" directly below it, and links to the help screen just a click away. Radio buttons enable the user to restrict searching to Title & Enhanced Title or more broadly to Full Text & Citation. The options of searching for an Article or Book Author are also presented. Limiting by date range follows.

Searchers may then select multiple subject areas from a scrolling controlled vocabulary window and restrict to specific country or geographic region and combine them by clicking on the appropriate Boolean operator. Matters are somewhat simplified with a highly visible "not U.S.A." check box. Limiting by Article or Publication Type is available via pull-down menus. Finally, the user may restrict searching to one or more specific sources via a linked Lookup table. The system supports Boolean and proximity operators as well as nesting, but there was no truncation, wild cards, or stemming.

Like the search screen, the Results list is not an aesthetic showpiece. Date, title (with a full-text indicator and a check box for marking selected sources), source, and word count (cryptically labeled "Text Available") are displayed in simply formatted rows and columns. The full text itself was presented without any graphics.

Price: Gale's pricing for CWI is based on institutional size. For comparative purposes, Union College, with 2300 FTE would pay $1,179 a year for single-user access and $1,376 for two to four simultaneous users. There is a free 30-day trial.

Who Needs It? As a full-text resource presenting multidisciplinary content from an impressive array of hard-to-locate resources, CWI fills an important research niche. Any institution with a women's studies program—or any kind of social sciences offerings—would want to make CWI available, particularly given this resource's very reasonable pricing.

Content: Gender Studies Database (GSD) is a powerful and all-inclusive new product combining NISC's Men's Studies, Women's Studies International, and Sexual Diversity Studies databases, with relevant contributions from the Child Development & Adolescent Studies, as well as Family & Society Studies Worldwide databases, into one single searchable database.

The components complement each other and include an impressive anthology of diverse files. This compilation allows GSD to incorporate a wide range of gender-related citations from scholarly monographs and book chapters. Popular content includes indexing and abstracts (and full text) from magazines such as Ms., Green Left Weekly, National N.O.W. Times, and The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide. Additional sources include newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, proceedings, conference papers, government reports, dissertations, and more.

GSD, available via the BiblioLine interface (with monthly updates) and on CD-ROM (with quarterly updates), includes 552,250+ records, with content from 1972 (and earlier) to the present. There is nothing thatcompares to it. Although some of the resources are freely available via databases such as Medline or WorldCat, having a one-stop-shopping approach is perfect for undergraduate research.

GSD also incorporates 1100+ "carefully selected" web sites, offering an evaluative path to relevant online resources. These records all contain complete abstracts and linked index terms. New sites are included regularly, and links are checked. We looked at the combined product for this review, but each database is available separately, a useful option depending on one's curriculum needs and budget.

Men's Studies Database (MSD) includes 45,000+ citations and abstracts and covers 250 core and hundreds more periodicals with access to journal articles, book reviews, books, book chapters, theses, dissertations, bulletins, newsletters, Internet documents, and more from 1990 to the present. Topical coverage includes men's studies and feminist pedagogy, marriage and divorce, child custody, masculinities and boyhood/manhood, and work/family relationships.

Women's Studies International (WSI) supports curriculum development in sociology, history, political science and economy, public policy, international relations, arts and humanities, business, and education. This in itself is an anthology of ten files, with 475,000+ records. Coverage includes feminist studies: theory and history, political/social activism, literary criticism, women's rights and suffrage, girl studies, and prejudice and gender discrimination. The compiled anthology includes many files, among them the Women's Studies Bibliography Database, which covers a wide range of social science disciplines; Women's Studies Database drawn from 125 journals worldwide; and MEDLINE Subset on Women, which incorporates an overall health perspective.

Sexual Diversity Studies: Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Transgender Abstracts (SDS) (formerly Gay & Lesbian Abstracts), with 80,120+ records (55 percent with abstracts), "offers a balanced, objective, and thorough review of scholarly as well as popular print, electronic, and Internet publications of the GLBT press" from 1977 to the present.

Searchability: For those familiar with the BiblioLine search engine, users have a simple and straightforward yet quite sophisticated interface. Institutions subscribing to other NISC products can cross-search if desired.

A new feature allows users to search WSI, SDS, and MSD individually or in combination. By default, all the titles are searched, and the full record displays which database(s) the citation was indexed in. In BASIC mode users can select an individual database via a pull-down menu option. This is a useful feature when needing to limit to, or browse in, a particular database. In the Advanced Search Mode, users can select an individual database, or any combination, and again the default is all three combined.

Although the BASIC Interface is suitable for most searches, users can quickly switch to Advanced Search (Pro) by a link at the top of the screen. Pro is presented as three "Search Modes" to accommodate users of all levels: QUICK mode provides a Basic Search; ADVANCED offers field searching options, including URL, Reviewer, Publication Type, and Keyword/Phrases, which can be searched separately or in any combination with the use of Boolean operators; and EXPERT is an updated version of the traditional online set-searching format.

BASIC's search page features four tabs: About, Search, Results, and Output. Basic Search is the perfect mode to execute simple as well as complex searches. Users can take advantage of integrated Boolean logic, via a drop-down menu; field limits; field searching; truncation; and range operators. Once a search is executed, the results page lets users display and sort the citations by a variety of options.

An excellent feature is the handling of full-text links for freely available resources that are in the brief record (as are OpenURL links if set up by your institution). Once the article is retrieved, a handy table with the highlighted and hyperlinked search term displays at the top of the page. Navigation is straightforward, with links, tabs, or icons to move from citation to citation, etc. The software also incorporates P.I.C. Variant Searching, which takes the guesswork out of searching for plurals, international spellings, and compound words.

Price: Subscriptions start at $1,795. This price provides single concurrent user access. Pricing is available for two to five concurrent users, six to ten concurrent users, etc.; 30-day trials available.

Who needs it? Gender Studies Database will be beneficial for all libraries collecting gay and lesbian material, although the depth and breadth of coverage, as well as the simple powerful interface, will make it especially attractive for undergraduate research and large public library reference collections. The BiblioLine software is truly noteworthy, and the comprehensive inclusion of material that currently has become a "hot topic" should turn heads.

Content: GenderWatch (GW), which along with Ethnic NewsWatch and Alt-PressWatch comprises the Diversity Database Suite, is another ProQuest/Softline collaboration that puts a very specialized and elusive collection of resources into researchers' hands. A full-text database incorporating archival material dating back to 1970, GenderWatch has a title list of some 200 scholarly journals, national and regional magazines, newspapers, and newsletters, books, conference proceedings, ephemera, and reports from a variety of governmental and nongovernmental agencies.

While some titles are widely known—The Advocate, Feminist Studies, Off Our Backs —there are many more out of the mainstream. Although the majority of GW sources are U.S. publications, there is considerable international representation, and the end result is anything but parochial.

Searchability: The somewhat clunky Softline interface has given way to the standard ProQuest look and feel, which should make most users more comfortable. Those preferring the original Softline interface have been accommodated via efforts to map subject headings from the Softline Thesaurus to the ProQuest vocabulary according to online documentation. We're not sure what this means to the typical GW searcher.

"Civil unions" doesn't even appear among the GW Thesaurus entries although ProQuest uses that heading. Using the Softline heading "Military (Gays in the Military)" as a Subject search first produces a syntax error with the parenthesis in place and no hits with the parenthesis removed. "Gays in the Military" alone produces no results as a Subject search. When the strategy is tried as a broader search in the Citation and abstract fields, hundreds of hits occur, with full text plus the subject heading combination of "Gays & lesbians" and "Military personnel" responsible for the modified strategy's success.

Searchers should simply set aside any preconceived notions about the antecedents of the resource and just go ahead and search. That leaves them with all the power and flexibility of the ProQuest interface.

Price: It depends on whether GW is packaged with the other databases in the ProQuest Diversity Suite. Contact your ProQuest representative or your consortium for specific pricing and discount information. Institutions may request a free trial.

Who Needs It? Like other resources explored here, GenderWatch excels at making an elusive body of literature accessible to a wider audience. But some products identify what's out there without providing the full text. GenderWatch, in contrast, delivers. By actually putting hard-to-come-by material into the hands of researchers via its extensive full-text offerings, GenderWatch represents virtually everything we look for in a special-purpose, contemporary e-resource. Suitable for academic libraries with any variation on a gender studies program or for public libraries serving diverse populations or interested in issues related to diversity.

Content: The Gerritsen Collection comprises some two million pages (microfilmed then digitally scanned) in 15 languages that document "the evolution of feminist consciousness and women's rights" over the course of four centuries.

There are two components to the collection: the Periodical Series and the Monograph Language Series. The Periodical segment includes full image runs of some 265 titles and makes up about one quarter of the database. Holdings range from The Suffragist (1913–21) to The Cook: A Weekly Handbook of Domestic Culinary Art for all Housekeepers (1885–86).

The bulk of Gerritsen is made up of 4,471 books, government publications, reports, pamphlets, and rare primary source documents, nearly half of which are in English and all of which are presented in full-image format.

Subject and format breakdowns include Bibliography; Biography and autobiography; Education and professional training; Feminism; History and social condition; Opinions, satires, anecdotes, aphorisms; Physiology of women; Political and social reform; Psychology of women; Women and employment; Women and religion; and Women and the arts. Each of these main areas is then further broken down by language or by subtopic and then language. Historian Virginia G. Drachman's introduction identifies key sources, explains their contribution to women's history, and assesses the collection from a scholarly perspective.

Searchability: From the main Gerritsen Collection page, a researcher may immediately begin to Search, Browse Books, or Browse Periodicals. Browse Books takes advantage of the 12 subject and format breakdowns (called the Gerritsen Index). The number of titles classified under a subject follows each Gerritsen Index topic. This number, framed in brackets, is clearly a link, and the researcher may go immediately to a chronologically arranged Results list.

Preceding the Gerritsen Index term is an "Expand arrow" icon. Clicking here presents a breakdown by language for Bibliography, Biography; Opinions, satires, anecdotes, aphorisms; Women and religion; and Women and the arts. For the remaining index terms, clicking on the expander gives a breakdown by subheading.

The broad Gerritsen Index in Browse Books is supplemented with a more detailed Subject Index that employs the same mechanisms for linking directly to a Results list or for accessing subtopic, language, or geographic area breakdowns. The Browse Periodicals button takes the researcher to an alphabetical listing of titles in the Periodicals Series. Clicking on the expander arrows first displays ranges of dates and then provides access to the contents of specific volumes and issues.

Gerritsen's Search mode is particularly well tuned to facilitate access to the database's unique resources. Users may Search all documents or just books or periodicals with the click of a prominently placed radio button. The search template offers a single Keyword search box with examples showing string searching and Boolean as well as a link to online Help.

Additional field searching options include Author, Book or Article Title, Publisher, City of Publication, Year of Publication (or range of years), Subject, Gerritsen Index, and Periodical Title. Publisher, City, Subject, Gerritsen Index, and Periodical Title all have their own associated Indexes for more precise searching, and scroll-down menus facilitate restricting by Language and Document Type. Put this all together, and it is possible to find a satirical piece in English on, say "beauty," published during the 1890s.

Boolean operators include AND, AND NOT, and OR. Proximity can be achieved using NEAR or FBY (followed by). The Gerritsen search engine uses stemming by default to enhance recall, but the user may employ quotation marks or preface a search term with EXACT to achieve more precise results. Quotation marks may also be used for phrase searching, and the system supports nesting.

Results are sorted by relevancy by default, but the user may arrange them by author, title, or publication date (in ascending or descending order). Results may also be marked for printing or email and formatted for use with a variety of bibliographic management programs.

Price: Pricing of The Gerritsen Collection is based on an institution's size, with an annual subscription running $2290 for sites with fewer than 2500 FTE and $3400 above that number. Since the collection is essentially static, ProQuest also offers libraries the option of buying the collection for $19,150 for sites below the 2500 FTE threshold and $28,000 above. ProQuest levies an additional $350 annual access fee when the collection is purchased outright. Libraries may make a single payment or spread the purchase cost out over time.

Who Needs It? The Gerritsen Collection is a women's studies resource with value far beyond the confines of women's studies alone. Faculty and students of political science, history, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, education, health, and literature should all be able to find ways to put Gerritsen to good use in teaching and research. The incredibly impressive diversity of resources assembled here—made easily accessible via the flexibility of the Chadwyck-Healey interface—provides users with a unique view into four centuries of social history.

Content: A cooperative effort between EBSCO and the ONE Institute & Archives of Los Angeles, the publication of the GLBT Life database is a milestone in organizing and enhancing access to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender literatures. The extensive collections of current and archival material managed by the ONE Institute, which fosters "acceptance of sexual and gender diversity by supporting education and research about our heritage and experience worldwide," form the basis of this resource.

GLBT Life contains indexing and abstracting for a "core" group of some 80+ GLBT-related periodicals, as well as bibliographic content from 70 additional periodicals, supplemented with material drawn from an additional 5000 titles.

Scholarly research on GLBT subjects is one focus, but cultural and lifestyle titles representing both national and regional perspectives are represented as well. The ONE Institute's involvement enabled EBSCO to index long retrospective runs of a number of historically and culturally significant titles, including Body Politic (1971–87), Christopher Street (1976–95), The Ladder (1956–72), Mattachine Review (1955–64), and ONE (1953–67). There are currently about 240 core and priority titles in the database, roughly half of which are for books.

EBSCO does provide full-text linking for some of the more prominent periodicals—The Advocate, Lesbian News—but for many of the titles that make GLBT Life so unique—like Diva, Just Out, Transgender Tapestry, and Washington Blade—coverage is limited to indexing and abstracting.

Searchability: Anyone who has used any EBSCOhost database will immediately feel comfortable. All the standard EBSCO search capabilities are present in GLBT Life, including Boolean searching with nesting, wildcards and truncation, field searching, and proximity. Additionally, the researcher may employ limiting (to a range of dates, articles with full-text linking, peer-reviewed journals, specific journal titles, and by document type) and expanding (to search within the full text of articles, include all search terms by default, and search for words related to the search term).

GLBT Life has its own controlled vocabulary, accessible via the EBSCO Thesaurus tab, where terms may be Browsed or Searched. Broader, Narrower, and Related Terms can be added to a search strategy by clicking in the check box next to each Thesaurus term.

Price: Contact EBSCO for pricing information. Librarians and faculty members may request a free trial.

Who Needs It? Study the list of titles indexed by GLBT Life and it will be obvious that this resource is groundbreaking. It does a really superb job of exerting bibliographic control over a very elusive body of literature. Unfortunately, many library users will be frustrated using GLBT Life because the full text still remains elusive—few libraries have the indexed material. Clearly, GLBT Life is one resource that begs for the addition of a full-text component.

Content: Greenwood Electronic Media's Women's Studies Encyclopedia is based on the revised and expanded three-volume print edition of the same name. Originally published by historian Helen Tierney in 1989, the updated version, released a decade later (and a year after Tierney's death), has been touted as "one of the most acclaimed and widely used reference sources in the field since its publication." This online sourcebook represents the entire revised print set in one searchable database, along with online enhancements including evaluated web sites, teacher resources, and multimedia resources.

With over 700 entries authored by 425 scholars from all disciplines, Women's Studies Encyclopedia offers a wide range of feminist perspectives necessary for multidisciplinary research.

The revised print edition expanded coverage of historical and contextual material and introduced new topics such as violence against women and women in public life. Access to 17 subject categories via the online platform include Activism, Area Studies, Law and Government, Race and Ethnicity, Science and Medicine, Sexuality, and Violence and Incarceration.

Although the interface and searching capabilities have been updated since the initial online release, the original content has not changed. We did find that the high-quality external links assisted with much of our currency concerns. Users can use these web sites to support their research on topics that are dated.

Searchability: The opening screen of Women's Studies Encyclopedia is straightforward and clear, offering users several methods for navigation. Log-in brings researchers to the Table of contents–Alphabetical view, with the first entry, Abolitionism, displayed in full in the center of the page. The TOC list is always present on the left side of the browser window from this mode, and users can easily move through the alphabet by selecting the desired letter. Surrounding entries are clearly visible—essential for an online encyclopedia—and we never got that "I'm lost" feeling that often occurs when print material is replicated on the web.

Navigation links are displayed on the right side of the screen and repeated at the bottom of each page for "Previous" and "Next," which allow users to move in a linear fashion. Related Links and Entries by Subject are displayed on the right-side frame as well.

In addition to the Alphabetical view, navigation to other search modes repeats throughout the session with links at the top of each page to Search, Subject View, Help, and Resources. The subject-based hierarchy includes all the encyclopedia's entries and some additional resources. A number of the subjects have subcategories, for example selecting "Activism" displays two article entries, as well as nine subcategories, including Anti-feminist movements, Gay liberation, and Women of color. The Resources section offers a brief list of additional material such as "Complete alphabetical list of entries," "Complete subject list of entries," "All links to external sites by entry subject," and "Countries or regions with dedicated entries." This is a handy entry point for specific queries, especially for area studies topics. The interface allows for truncation and Boolean searching. Records can be reformatted for printing, and an email option will soon be available for output.

Price: Subscriptions are based on FTE and population served and range from a one-time purchase price of $700 to $2500 for unlimited access. Institutions are also charged an annual web-access flat fee of $50. Individual pricing is also available, as are 30-day trials.

Who Needs It? Although a good deal of the content could benefit from some review, and new topics should be included in any planned revision, Women's Studies Encyclopedia still stands as an important reference source. The scholarly articles are essential for understanding the basic representation of women socially, politically, and historically, and the extensive bibliographic sources are invaluable for further study. The online format is easy to navigate, and the database should be affordable by all institutions.