Welcome to 2009

On behalf of the WMU Libraries, I’d like to welcome all of you in Gender and Women’s Studies back to campus and wish you a successful and interesting New Year! I have wanted to communicate with you on a more regular basis, but did not want to fill you e-mail boxes with attachments and more junk. I have used blogs for other professional and personal communications, so I am starting a blog: Gender and Women’s Studies at WMU Libraries. I will send out occasional information in an e-mail to all of you in WMS and a link to this blog, so in case you missed any previous information, that will be available to you. Please feel free to comment on this format, what you would like to know from me, etc. If you would just like a link to the blog, with maybe a table of contents, I could do that also.

Women’s Studies International - New Database!

This database indexes the core disciplines in women's studies, covering over 2,000 periodical sources, including those from Women Studies Abstracts, Women’s Studies Bibliography Database, Women Studies Librarian and several others. It includes references to journals, newspapers, newsletters, bulletins, books, book chapters, proceedings, reports, theses, dissertations, NGO studies, Web sites & documents, and grey literature. Coverage is from 1972 to present. We are planning to discontinue the database Contemporary Women's Issues, which we have found difficult to use, but please comment if this is a very important resource for you.

Research Instruction

If your course contains an assignment that will require research using library materials – books, articles, primary sources, etc. I really encourage you to schedule an instruction session with me <maira.bundza@wmich.edu> or one of the other librarians. Though our students are excellent Google users, they do find it difficult to navigate in all the library databases and evaluate good sources for their research. I think it is most useful if the class comes to the library and gets instruction and hands on experience working on their topic for the assignment. If you really haven’t scheduled time for that, I could come in for a brief demo in class or prepare a short guide (online and/or print) for your assignment.

Is this journal peer-reviewed?

We get this question all the time. Some databases let you limit your search to peer-reviewed articles, but many do not have this feature. Now, everyone can easily find out this information. Enter a journal title under the Journals tab on our home page http://www.wmich.edu/library/ or click the Find it @ WMU button when you find an article in our databases. In the top right corner you will now see a note if the journal is peer-reviewed, its journal type (academic/scholarly, trade, etc.), and its frequency. The "…more details" link goes directly to information such as subject coverage, a link to the journal’s web site, the editor’s name, etc.