Women's Studies Section

Association of College & Research Libraries / American Library Association

Description

The Avalon Project is a burgeoning full-text archive containing more than sixty landmark collections in the fields of law, history, economics, politics, diplomacy and government. Of special note are various collections of treaties, statutes, speeches of the President, documents of the League of Nations and the United Nations, documents on 9/11 and a significant database on the African American Experience. The collections are divided into century groups which include pre-18th, 18th, 19th, 20th and 21st Century. Documents are listed individually in an alphabetical title list on a Major Collections page.

A special feature is the addition of links within a document to supporting documents expressly referred to within the text. Additional content is being added on an ongoing basis.

Women's Studies Content

Within documents which have shaped law and society for the last several hundred years or longer, the fully searchable full-text format makes these key documents accessible for exploration of women's studies issues for the first time. Many of these documents ignore issues of gender but where they are addressed, Avalon allows them to be identified, albeit cumbersomely. Because the database lacks a controlled vocabulary and does not highlight search words in retrieved documents, it is difficult to determine the relevance of search results without wading through the entire resulting document.

Some resources of interest to women's studies are

• The Trial of Jeanne D'Arc
• The Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850)
• Project Diana: Online Human Rights Archive - United Nations documents related to marriage, discrimination of women, gender-specific war crimes against women, and a petition of aid for Cuban women prisoners of consience
• September 11, 2001: Attack on America - documents on the status of Afghan women

Searching

The entire database is searchable, and searching is allowed on some of the individual collections. Searching is based on an UltraSeek platform, and can be finely drawn. However, exact punctuation must be followed for boolean searching. For example, the default operator is OR, so that women's rights would find all documents that contain the term women's OR the term rights. To search women's rights, double quotes must be used: "women's rights."

Archive Review:
Susan White
Princeton University