Collection Policies

The Women's Studies collection supports present and anticipated interdisciplinary teaching and research at Old Dominion University on the subject of women. The program offers both interdisciplinary courses and courses cross-listed with the departments represented by participating faculty members. In the Fall of 1995, ODU became the first state-assisted university in Virginia to offer a B.A. and B.S. in Women's Studies. This major requires 33 hours of Women's Studies and cross-listed courses. The Women's Studies program also offers a 15-hour minor. Graduate students may earn a Women's Studies Certificate in addition to another graduate degree in another department, school, or college, or as an emphasis for an M.A. in the Institute of Humanities.

In addition, the collection supports the efforts of the Old Dominion University Women's Center, which provides counseling for community women who are thinking of returning to school, changing careers, or entering the labor force.

Finally, the collection seeks to fill the gap in the recorded history of humankind (which until recently omitted women and their contributions) by providing as much retrospective and currently available material as the budget will allow.

Languages: English is the primary language of the collection. Foreign language materials are purchased, but English translations of these materials are preferred. Materials in German, French, and Spanish languages are collected in cooperation with the foreign languages faculty and collection development librarians for those subjects.

Chronological Guidelines: Primary emphasis will be placed on research works covering the 17th century to the present, although there is an interest among faculty and students in earlier historical periods, which serves as a secondary emphasis.

Geographical Guidelines: Materials dealing with women in North America and Europe are primarily collected. Special efforts are made to collect materials on third world women: Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

Treatment of Subject: Both fiction and non-fiction will be acquired. Emphasis will be on scholarly works, including biographies, autobiographies, diaries and journals, with popular and polemical works selected to provide a cross-section of current thought. Small and alternative press materials will be sought as that is still a way for some women's work to be published.

Type of Material: Scholarly and popular monographs, reference works, and periodicals will be acquired. Also, special efforts will be made to acquire alternative press journals and appropriate indexing. Dissertations and theses will be added at the request of the faculty on a selective basis. The purchase of books, serials, and other library materials in the original format is preferred, except where cost and availability dictate otherwise. Comprehensive microform collections will be considered for purchase as budgets allow.

Electronic formats for indexing publications are becoming the norm, allowing for efficient searching. At present such CD-ROM databases as Sociofile, PsycLit, Medline, Historical Abstracts, America: History and Life, ERIC, MLA Bibliography, and others provide access to many aspects of Women's Studies. A comprehensive CD-ROM index, Women's Studies on Disc, has been requested for purchase consideration by the Library's Electronic Resource Acquisitions Committee, and it is hoped we will soon have this resource available. Many valuable resources are also available on the Internet, including FirstSearch databases, UnCover, and a number of Web sites related to women's issues. Since Internet access is available at many library work stations, students and faculty can readily search a much more diverse body of literature than in the past, much of it being available for downloading, or via the Interlibrary Loan Service, or through commercial document delivery systems.

Date of Publication: Current imprints and newly issued reprints will be purchased extensively. Retrospective buying of general circulation materials, an integral part of the acquisitions program, will supplement current, in-print purchases.

Other General Considerations:

• Other Resources
• United States Government Publications:  The Government Publications Collection contains materials important for researchers in Women's Studies; notably, the Departments of Labor and Education have published many useful materials. Access is primarily provided through Marcive, a computer-searchable catalog of U.S. government publications which lists nearly 1000 subject headings related to women (e.g., Abused Women, Aged Women, Hispanic American Women, Colleges for Women, Legal Status of Women, the Military and Women, Women - Diseases, Women - Employment, etc.). Also, searches on the ODU Library online catalog can be limited to the Government Publications Collection, providing an efficient mode of access for all U.S. government serials, as well as documents received since 1990.
 
• Women's Center: The Women's Center of Old Dominion University maintains a library of approximately 1000 books and pamphlets and is open to all.  The subjects covered are:

Access:  The Women's Center collection is accessed using three notebooks, with author, title, and subject categories (see above).
Acquisitions:  There is no line item in the budget for library materials; purchases are made at the end of the year, based on funds remaining unspent or from a donations account. This library does not subscribe to any periodicals. A small video collection is available only to faculty or staff for class use or programming.

• Other Libraries with materials on women and art are The Chrysler Museum Library, in downtown Norfolk and the Hofheimer Art Library, a departmental Library of the Old Dominion University Library.

 
• Center for Research Libraries (CRL): The Center for Research Libraries (CRL), of which the ODU Library is a member, functions as a cooperative research library, with collections totaling over five million items. Records of the Women's Bureau of the U.S. Department of Labor, 1918 - 1965 include reports of the director, annual summaries, major conferences, speeches, and articles. Other holdings, such as newspapers, foreign doctoral dissertations, and other collections, though not pertaining directly to women, may prove pertinent to certain research in women's studies. The CRL catalog is available electronically on the ODU Library section of the university's Gopher and World Wide Web sites. Items from CRL may be borrowed through the Interlibrary Loan Office, where a microfiche catalog is also available.

• Related Subject Policy Statements

Women's Studies coordinates acquisitions with the efforts of bibliographers in interdisciplinary area studies programs, as well as English and foreign literatures, art history, history, humanities, psychology, sociology, political science, international studies, and other disciplines. Many materials pertaining to women are acquired through other academic department budgets and the library's approval plan.
 
• Collection Strengths and Weaknesses: Overall, the collection is a fairly substantial one for a library of our size. In 1991 we owned 66% of the books listed in the respected two-volume bibliography, Women's Studies:  a Recommended Core Bibliography, compiled by Stineman and Loeb. We own 52% of the periodicals listed in that source. We have a good solid reference collection, including a wide variety of indexes, abstracts, and statistical sources. We have a collection of significant microform serials and research sets including American Ladies Magazine (1828-1836), Scrapbooks of Susan B. Anthony (1848-1900), National Women's Party Papers (1850-1972), The Woman Voter (1910-1917), Woman's Dreadnought (continued by Worker's Dreadnought) (1914-1924), and Women's Protest (continued by Protest Against Woman Suffrage) (1912-1918). We are not deficient in any one area of women's studies; we simply lack sources across the board because of insufficient funding.