Women's Studies Section

Association of College & Research Libraries / American Library Association

1700s to the present

Description

Publication of Archival, Library & Museum Materials (PALMM) is a cooperative initiative of the public universities of Florida to provide digital access to important source materials for research and scholarship. It is a portal to digitized materials concerning Florida’s history, heritage, people, geography, government, and natural surroundings as well as non-Florida related material including: children’s literature from 1850 and beyond, the psychological study of the arts, 19th century American and British actors, Virgin Islands history and culture, Eric Eustace Williams (Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago), and a world map collection.

Women's Studies Content

Women’s studies related material includes historical photographs of Floridian women, Native American women, and women’s clubs; short stories by women; women as subject in historic state government documents; and fully digitized historical books and literature whose topics surround women or girls. Individual collections within PALMM which include significant women’s studies resources include Textual Collections, Visual Collections, Reclaiming the Everglades, and Ringling Collection.

Searching

Collections may be searched individually or as a group (not all collections can be included in this group) via a very robust, though not so visually appealing, union catalog. Basic, advanced, and command line searching are available for collections included in the union catalog. PALMM contains records for items that are not digitized but one is easily able to search for only digital objects by limiting the Format to “Items Available Online.” Make sure to search the Archival Collection on its own as it is not part of the union catalog. The union catalog allows browsing of records (not of images) by title and author, while several individual collections allow browsing for images by subject/keyword.

As a result of multi-institution collaboration, PALMM covers a large range of topics, but this also results in an equally wide range of methods employed to describe a given collection; ie some collections provide more opportunities for quality results from a keyword search than others. Searching each collection individually is suggested for the most comprehensive search. Search help is available for each individual collection within PALMM as well as the group of collections that may be searched simultaneously.

• Controlled vocabulary
• Group collection - Library of Congress subject headings including Children’s, Medical, Local, and Geographic
• Other collections include material and topic specific forms of controlled vocabulary

Archive Review:
Kristi Palmer
Indiana University - Purdue University