Women's Studies Collection Development (Summary)
Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary field that examines women's experiences and gender roles as they affect the lives of women and men, culture, and the course of history. Most Women's Studies scholarship is informed by a feminist perspective. Because of the interdisciplinary nature of the field, material relevant to Women's Studies is found throughout Memorial Library (the research library for the humanities and social sciences), in the (undergraduate) College Library Women's Collection, the Social Work Library, the Wisconsin Historical Society Library, which is responsible for collecting material on North American women's history, and virtually all other University of Wisconsin-Madison libraries.
MadCat
Madcat is the unified online catalog of holdings throughout the University of Wisconsin-Madison libraries and the library of the Wisconsin Historical Society.
In Memorial Library
Women's Studies material in Memorial Library
includes books, periodicals, microforms, audiovisual items, and electronic
resources. Memorial Library collects Women's Studies material comprehensively
to support the curriculum of the
Women's
Studies Program, courses in other disciplines that examine gender
factors, and research on women and gender topics in the social sciences
and humanities. In addition, the
Office
of the University of Wisconsin System Women's Studies Librarian is
housed in Memorial Library. This Office publishes current awareness resource periodicals and topical bibliographies
in Women's Studies and offers reference assistance and library instruction. Women's Studies subject areas emphasized in the Memorial Library collection
are feminist theory (including critiques of social, political, philosophical,
and scientific theories of women's nature); sociology (including the study
of women in self-selected and socially-defined groups, the study of social
problems affecting women); studies of the intersection of gender with
race, class, ethnicity, sexual preference, and other "differences;" women's
history; and literature by women, literary criticism about women's writing,
and studies of women writers. Memorial Library also has extensive material
on women and gender aspects of anthropology, economics, education, film
studies, health, linguistics, mass communications, philosophy, psychology,
political science, religion, and science; and information in many languages
on the lives of women in every country and inhabited region of the world. The Memorial
Library Department of Special Collections includes the
Cairns
Collection of American Women Writers, 1650-1920, and other literary
special collections with relevant material. The Reference Collection contains
Women's Studies bibliographies, encyclopedias, indexes, and other related
reference works. For information on the English-language holdings in literature,
linguistics, and film studies, contact the British and American Humanities
Bibliographer, Room 278D Memorial Library, (608) 262-3244.
