Workshop co-ordinator: Jacquelyn Marie,
Women's Studies Librarian at the McHenry Library at the University of California at Santa Cruz (California)

Jacquelyn Marie's web site is called "WSSLINKS International Women" and it lists and describes all academic women's libraries in the US.

Workshop presentation 1

Ximena Charnes, General Co-ordinator, ISIS International-Santiago (Chile)
Our brand-new web site gathers all possible information produced by or about women in Latin America. (Other ISIS offices cover Europe.) We combine international perspectives with regional ones, and link governmental and non-governmental activities.
Users can request a bibliographical search on given keywords. Our objective is to enable more individual women to generate information themselves and to enter into dialogue with others, ultimately enabling women to take leading roles in the development process.
Barriers:

1) Few women in Latin America have access to computer equipment.

2) Few people have adequate training to set up and maintain a database or web site.

3) The Internet is dominated by English-language materials. Very little is available in Spanish.

4) Obtaining financing is difficult.

Future directions:

1) We cannot neglect traditional ways of communicating with the women we serve. Women's information centres have the responsibility to collect information from the grassroots level and transform it into online information. Equally, online information must be passed on to the grassroots level (by using traditional media such as radio, local meetings, printed material).

2) To begin with, we are not putting our database online and our site is not searchable. Maybe we will do this in future.

3) We are considering offering our web site English as well as Spanish.

Workshop presentation 2

Irene Chaverri Polini, RUTA Consultant and GEMA Co-ordinator, GEMA (San Jose, Costa Rica)
The GEMA Platform resulted from an agreement by all governmental and non-governmental bodies involved in rural development projects in Central America. In 1997 GEMA started a quarterly electronic newsletter ("Boletin Centroamericano") on rural development projects in Central America, emphasizing gender aspects. The web site is aimed at development workers and consultants, and training is offered to them to use the site. The web site describes all development projects in progress, gives a list of consultants available for such projects, and gives full text of relevant working papers. The information offered on development projects is obtained by asking each project team to fill out a questionnaire. Each of the six Central American countries has its own GEMA committee responsible for gathering information for the Platform, and for distributing the information to those in their country with no access to Internet. Women's groups with no access to computers can mail us photographs and hand written reports. GEMA processes them and puts them online.
Barriers:

1) In Central America few people have access to computers.

2) The Internet is dominated by English-language materials. Very little is available in Spanish.

3) Information is not well distributed.

Future directions:
We are now funded by the World Bank and other NGOs, but would like to become financially independent. We want to translate our web site into English.

Workshop presentation 3

Christa Wille, Ariadne, Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek (Vienna, Austria)

We compared our own women's studies database (Ariadne) with three others in Europe, to see if we could find ways to improve ours.

* all are non-commercial and free to users

* all are produced at educational institutions

* all are searchable online and the search features are good

* all are catalogues (of books and/or articles), so in addition to bibliographical information you get the location and call number of each document

* the cataloguing of subjects is professionally done and the vocabulary reflects the needs of women's issues.

* all descriptors are in the language of the home country, except for one.

Recommendations for all women's studies databases in Europe:

* improve the sorting features

* include English-language descriptors

* aim at a real multi-lingual thesaurus

* integrate other services like document delivery

* add full-text search potential

Comment:
Although it may seem a disadvantage that Europe has so many different languages, perhaps this linguistic diversity enables Europeans to have a deeper understanding of differences between people.

Workshop presentation 4

 
Helga Dickel, die media (name of private company meaning "she media")
My partner and I went into business in 1995 as women's information brokers. We produce and sell a database on CD-ROM which works under Windows. It has over 5,000 entries of women's organizations, networks, libraries, journals, and educational centres, mainly in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We also list businesswomen, and they pay to be listed. (There is no fee for organizations to be listed.) The database is highly searchable, and can also be used to generate address lists for mailings. Our customers are women's organizations, libraries, and marketing bureaus. If we continue to issue a new version of our CD-ROM every 2 years, it will eventually be a useful source for the study of the development of women's organizations in Germany.

Workshop presentation 5

Beth Stafford, Librarian for Women's Studies and Women in International Development at the University of Illinois Library (Urbana, Illinois)

1) Our web site offers a searchable relational database on all women's studies programs at universities in the United States. It includes the names of all courses taught at these universities related to women's issues or women in international development, and names of all teaching staff involved in women's studies. If someone is going to teach a new course, for example, it may be very helpful to use the database to find people who have taught a similar course before. In the future, we would like to add information on women's studies programs in other countries. The information comes from questionnaires (on paper or electronically) filled in each year by the programs listed.

 

2) Our web site offers a searchable database on videotapes in our library that include materials on women. This makes it possible for people (like teachers) to find out whether there is a video available on some specific aspect or geographical region. Now there are only 100 entries. We would like to add more, but it is expensive to provide the descriptions.

 

3) We offer online files (not searchable) on "Women in Science, Engineering and Technology". It gives the title pages and tables of contents of all books in our library in this field, broken down into subject categories. We hope to expand this to include contents from books in other libraries.

Workshop presentation 6

Jenny Radloff, Librarian, African Gender Institute, University of Cape Town (South Africa)
co-presenter: Marie-Helene Mottin-Sylla, ENDASYNFEV (Dakar, Senegal)
The Women'sNet web site is designed to enable South African women to find the people, issues, resources, tools and skills they need. Its objective is to empower South African women to use information more effectively in their struggle towards women's equality. We want to link together all the small women's groups scattered around the country and create a platform for women's voices. The web site is purposefully low on graphics so that those with slow connections can access the information more quickly. Women'sNet offers training workshops to women's organizations and we also hope to share our training methods with women in other parts of the Southern African Development Community.

* Many women in South Africa have no access to Internet.

* In 1997 thirty South African women's organizations met to talk about making a web site. We first set up an e-mail discussion network for six months to discuss ideas for the new site. Then several of us got training in HTML and set up the site ourselves. We documented this training process, so that it can be used by other women's groups.

* The web site includes a calendar of events, full-text documents, back issues of our weekly Women'sNet, and links to all other relevant African sites.

Questions: How long does it take to update a database or website?
One answer: it takes half a year and many, many phone calls.
Another answer: it takes a full-time employee continuously working.

How can we make sure people will be able to find our web site?
Answers:

• get registered with all the major search engines;
• send e-mails to relevant electronic discussion groups;
• ask all organizations you work with to list you as a link;
• distribute printed brochures announcing the web site and include your web site in all your published materials.