Collection Policies

WOMEN'S, GENDER, AND SEXUALITY STUDIES
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

 PROGRAM DESCRIPTION

Subjects Covered:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection supports teaching and research conducted by faculty affiliated with the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department.  The collection includes materials relating to gender expectation, gender identity, cultural constructions of gender, issues of gender equality, gender aspects of race and class, sex-based discrimination, sexuality, sexual orientation, pornography, feminism, transnational feminism, and feminist theory.  Interdisciplinary material relating to women's place in society, the family, economics, politics, the law, and education are also included as are interdisciplinary studies of women's history, women in the sciences, women in the social sciences, and women in the arts.

Departments and Users Served:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection serves students and faculty in women's, gender, and sexuality studies as well as students and faculty in other arts, humanities, and social sciences disciplines.  Students in the College of Law, the College of Medicine, the College of Nursing, the College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services, and the College of Business Administration likewise draw on aspects of the women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection.

Quantitative Information:   http://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/wgss.html

The Faculty: http://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/wgss/fac_staff.html

Degrees Granted:

Undergraduate Major, Minor and 4+1:   http://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/wgss/undergrad.html

Graduate Masters, MA/JD, MA/PhD, and 4+1: http://www.artsci.uc.edu/departments/wgss/grad.html

Grants and Special Funding:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection receives its funding from the library's general monographic and serial allocations. The Laura Schor WGSS Library Endowment is situated in the U.C. Foundation and is at the disposal of the Head of the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Department.

GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF THE COLLECTION

Location:   The women's, gender, and sexulaity studies collection is housed in the Langsam Library.  Friends of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies gift books have been placed in appropriate college and departmental libraries when the subject matter is more generally appropriate to a specific collection like the College Conservatory of Music or the College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning.  Space considerations dictate that more of the older, little circulated monographs and discontinued serials are in the Southwest Ohio Regional Storage Depository.

Other Collections Supporting the Program

Internal:   Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies draws on every disciplinary area within the library's collections although less so for Engineering, Physics, Chemistry, Biology, and Mathematics.  The Classics Library maintains a strong collection of materials about women in classical antiquity and about women in modern Greece.  The College Conservatory of Music targets women in music as part of its collection development.  The College of Design, Art, Architecture, and Planning collects works about women as the subject of art and as artists and architects in their own right.  The College of Education supports the women's studies collection in areas dealing with feminist pedagogy and the education of girls and women.  The College of Business Administration collects material on women in management, women in advertising, and the glass ceiling. Within the College of Arts and Sciences women's studies is supported by the departments of Anthropology, English and Comparative Literatures, Philosophy, Economics, Romance Languages and Literatures, Germanic Languages and Literatures, Sociology, Psychology, and Geography.  The Asian Studies Program supports the women's studies collection by purchasing books about women in Asia.  The African American Studies Program supports the women's studies collection by purchasing books about African American women.  The School of Social Work supports those aspects of the women's studies collection that deal with issues and problems in serving the female client.

The College of Law, including its Urban Morgan Institute on Human Rights, supports the women's studies collection, especially in areas that intersect with the joint degree program between women's studies and law.

The women's studies collection also receives support from the media collection and from the Cohen collection, as well as support from the general social sciences and general humanities funds.

External:   Collections at the Public Library of Cincinnati and Hamilton County, especially their collection of women's fiction, support the women's studies collection.  Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion provides in depth information about women in Judaism.  Xavier University and the College of Mt. St. Joseph support that part of the women's studies collection dealing with women in religious orders.  Women's studies faculty and students also draw upon the combined collections in OhioLINK and research materials located at the Center for Research Libraries.

Collection History:   The Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, founded in 1974 to facilitate research and teaching about women and gender related issues at the University of Cincinnati, is among the earliest of such programs in the United States.  The Master of Arts degree, established in 1991, is one of the first four graduate programs in women's studies in the country.  In 1995 the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the College of Law pioneered a joint degree program, the JD/MA, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies designed to meet the interests and needs of students specializing in family law, human rights, sex-based discrimination, and civil liberties.

Friends of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies is a 400-member community organization founded in 1980 to support the programs, research, and teaching offered by the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Dues and income from the Friends endowment are used to support an annual visiting professor, to organize special lectures, and to provide for special events such as a women's film festival.  Friends offers research and travel grants to students and faculty affiliated with the Center for Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.  Friends also supports the women's studies library collection through an ongoing library gift book program, and has made matching grants to the library to benefit the women's studies collection, the largest of which was a $6,000 matching grant made during fiscal year 1991-1992 that enabled the women's studies collection to off set in part the effect of the 50% budgetary cut to the collection levied the previous year.  Since then Friends has raised matching money to erase a serial deficit and has raised the Laura Schor Library

General Level of Collecting:   Collection building using the budget allocation for women's, gender, and sexuality studies is conducted at basic through advanced undergraduate and graduate.  However, areas of the women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection that enjoy the added support of complimentary disciplines are collected at advanced undergraduate through research levels.
 

SPECIFIC ASPECTS OF THE COLLECTION

Call Numbers:  Treatment of women's issues may be found throughout the Library of Congress classification system.  As practiced at the University of Cincinnati the women's studies library budget is used chiefly for concentrated collecting in the HQ call number ranges.

HQ1-2039............The family. Marriage. Women

HQ12-449............Sexual life

HQ450-471.............Erotica

HQ503-1064...........The family. Marriage. Home
                                                                          Including child study, eugenics,
                                                                          Desertion, adultery, divorce,
                                                                          Polygamy, the aged

HQ1101-2030.7...........Women. Feminism. Women's clubs

HQ2035-2039............Life skills. Coping skills.  Everyday living
                                                                         skills

Bibliographic works about women or that touch on women's issues are also collected.  Such works generally fall within the Library of Congress Z call numbers.

Z5051-7999...............Subject bibliography

Z8000-8999...............Personal bibliography

Current and Retrospective Collecting:  The monographic allocation for women's, gender, and sexuality studies does not permit active retrospective collection building.  Emphasis is placed on the acquisition of current monographic materials.  The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection benefits from the retrospective collection development of other disciplinary areas in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and sciences.

Time Period Collected:   The women's studies collection contains works about women in all areas of recorded time, although greater emphasis is given to collecting material about women from the Medieval period to the present.

Levels and Treatments:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection contains works suitable for upper division students, graduate students, and faculty research.  Textbooks are infrequently collected, if at all.

Languages:   English is the primary language of the collection developed through the women's, gender, and sexuality studies monographic allocation, although important books by French feminist theorists are sometimes purchased in the original as well as in translation.  Because of its interdisciplinary nature and the support that women's, gender, and sexuality studies receives from other areas of the collection, the Romance and Germanic languages are well represented in the overall women's studies collection. Works in Greek are to be found in the Classics Library.

Geographical Areas:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection contains material representing many geographical areas including, but not limited to, the United States, Canada, Latin America, Western and Eastern Europe, India, China, and Japan.

Types of Resources:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection includes monographs, series, society publications, journals, atlases, indexes, abstracts, bibliographies, handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, government publications, and web sites.

Resource Formats:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection includes print, microform, video, and digital formats.

Endowed Areas Supported by Restricted Funds:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection is supported by the library's general funds.  Interest drawn by the Laura Schor Library Endowment is being reinvested by the U.C. Foundation to further build the endowment's principal until such time as the fund may make a significant annual draw to support collection development.
 

ACQUISITION PROCESS

Approval Plans:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection participates in the approval plan supplied by Yankee Book Peddler.

Firm Orders:   Firm orders for women's, gender, and sexuality studies are selected from a variety of sources including vender notification slips, direct mail brochures, publisher catalogs, book reviewing publications and faculty requests.

Standing Orders:   The women's, gender, and sexuality studies collection maintains standing orders for journal publications.

Document Suppliers:   The women's, gender, and sexuality  studies collection relies heavily on direct patron access through OhioLINK and the Library's Interlibrary Loan Department for access to items that are not in our collection, are in circulation, or are missing from our collection.

Special Vendors:   The women's, gender, and sexulaity studies collection relies on the Acquisition Department to determine if a special vendor is needed to acquire requested materials.

Sally Moffitt

July 2014