Minutes-Track 4 Workshop III

Minutes of Workshops Know How Conference / August 1998

Minutes of Track 4. III

Modelling Women's Information Services

Thursday, August 26 1998

Workshop co-ordinator: Marieke Kramer,
Toplink Professional Women's Recruitment Bureau, The Hague, the Netherlands

Workshop co-ordinator Marieke Kramer opened the session by stating the workshop's central topic: how to set up a women's information service. Questions that she expected the workshop to address were: What kinds of training are necessary for workers at women's information services? Is there a need for a standard manual for women's information services?

The first presenter was Annamaria Tagliavini of the Centro di Documentazione delle Donne in Bologna, Italy. She presented a paper titled "Building a Women's Public Institution: Perspective toward the New Millenium," which addressed three topics: modeling, training, and drafting a manual. The paper drew on the experience of the Centro di Documentazione delle Donne in establishing an information center, an electronic information system (ServerDonne), and a women's school for politics (the Hannah Arendt School of Politics).

Tagliavini stated that providing a model for new women's information services requires flexibility and inventiveness, in order to change the models provided by established institutions to fit women's current information needs. As an example she cited the Orlando documentation center in Bologna, which is neither solely publicly nor privately funded, but relies on both public and private funds. On training, Tagliavini mentioned the necessity that workers in women's documentation centers have a "double competence": knowledge in both library science and in gender issues. To address this, she suggested the development of a standard curriculum to train professional librarians in gender issues, and an international exchange program for staff of women's information centers around the world, as a way to share this specialized professional knowledge.

Tagliavini advised against trying to draft a single manual for all women's information centers, as different centers will have different needs depending on their (cultural, geographical, etc.) contexts. Instead, she suggested producing a more general list of practical instructions and important sources for knowledge on establishing a women's information service. She also emphasized the value of building relationships and networks to guide new centers.

The second presenter was Natalia Babich of the Women's Innovation Foundation "East-West" (ZhIF) in Moscow, Russia.
Babich's paper was titled "Information Service for Women, Networking of the Documentation Centers, Russian Experience." ZhIF is a non-governmental organization that is a women's information center. It has its own on-line documentation center (OWL - Open Women's Line), and provides other kinds of information support and resources to women. Babich stated that ZhIF received assistance from AIDOS - the Italian Association for Women in Development - including a manual on creating and managing women's information centers, and month-long training sessions in Moscow. ZhIF organized its own regional conference in 1997 to help women's organizations develop their own information services. The foundation continues to offer support to these organizations, in the form of further training and information-sharing. In this way, Babich stated, ZhIF is developing a regional documentation network. Babich called on other documentation centers to establish similar networks in their own regions, in order to link women's information services worldwide.

Babich questioned the usefulness of developing a general manual, because many smaller manuals have already been developed, and because the rapid development of new technologies might make such a manual obsolete. However, Babich suggested the exchange of knowledge between women's information centers through the exchange of staff, and through international networking.

Asli Davaz-Mardin of the Women's Library and Information Centre in Istanbul, Turkey was the third presenter. She spoke on her library's development of a collection of Turkish women's periodicals. At the beginning, the library had almost no funds to develop the collection, and no basic reference catalogue of women's periodicals in Turkey. Mardin listed the library's tasks: to find financial supporters, to make a list of women's periodicals from the preceding 125 years, and to find sources for acquiring copies of the periodicals. The library found sponsors to help pay for shelves and issues, established a volunteer group of scholars to produce a bibliography of women's periodicals, and used volunteer labor to acquire and organize the collection. Mardin emphasized the importance of volunteer work, fundraising, and excellent planning and organization to start a women's information service.

Anju Vyas of the Centre for Women's Development Studies in New Delhi, India was the fourth presenter. The paper she presented was titled "Training Workshop on Information Services for Gender and Development: A Sharing of Experiences from India." Vyas spoke on four training sessions on women's information given by her center, in collaboration with the SNDT Women's University in India, between 1995 and 1997. As the first of their kind in India, the training sessions were general, and were conducted for library specialists as well as non-professionals. The trainings dealt specifically with the needs of services that provided information on gender and development, and included visits to mainstream libraries and women's organizations. Vyas reported that in these trainings, women's information issues were addressed in terms of both women's studies and library science. As a result, the professional librarians learned about gender issues, while workers from women's organizations learned about information handling.

The final presenter was Christine Wise of the Fawcett Library at London Guildhall University in England. Her presentation was titled "How to Build the Collections of a National Library of Women." Wise described the Fawcett Library's work in developing its collections on women, in preparation for becoming the National Library of Women when its new building is completed in 2000. Wise described her library's wide-ranging development policy, which aims to include materials in all possible formats, languages, and subjects that pertain to women in the United Kingdom and British Commonwealth countries. The objective of the policy is to develop a collection for women that will last and have relevance to women far into the future. Wise proposed that the participants of the Know How Conference compile a manual to assist women's information services in their development. She volunteered to work with others to put this manual together and present it at the next international conference on women's information.

After the presentations, the discussion was opened up for questions and suggestions from the workshop participants. One participant suggested that, instead of a manual that might be too specific to be useful to services in a broad range of contexts, a general set of guidelines should be produced for women's information services. In response to another question, Asli Mardin described the importance of having a contextual and historical view in developing a new collection - as in the case of her library's periodical collection, which was developed both as a precedent-setting collection (the first of its kind in Turkey), and for what it will represent in a few decades. In response to a question from a participant interested in setting up her own information center on women's human rights, presenters suggested that new centers consult the staff of centers that have already been set up - not only of law libraries, but also other women's libraries - and check the Mapping the World database to find other women's information services to consult.

Marieke Kramer then suggested that the workshop try to come to some resolutions.

- One participant suggested that broad guidelines for women's information services were necessary, but that the creation of more specific manuals should be left to particular countries and regions. Broader guidelines could be circulated to help information centers or networks to write their own manuals. Another participant suggested that the guidelines be very general, and not at all prescriptive - perhaps in the form of "headings" or subject categories for information services to follow when writing their own manuals. A third emphasized the need for some set of guidelines, to help new services with the very difficult task of starting a new service.

- Anju Vyas stated that training must also be region-specific, in order to be most practical and useful for the services receiving the training.
- In the writing of general guidelines, Asli Mardin suggested that the writers keep in mind the lack of staff with training in both women's studies and library science. Another participant emphasized the importance that women's library workers be library experts as well as have a familiarity with women's issues. Another asserted that the library experts must understand the field of women's studies in order to make good collection development decisions. Another suggested that librarians can take women's studies courses, or even learn about women's issues on the job in a women's library.
- Natalia Babich described the difficulties of her own organization in trying to develop a manual for women's information services. She stated that fundraising efforts took so long that once the money for a project had finally been raised, the project itself had lost its relevance. Instead, she suggested creating a space for exchanging experiences - perhaps a place for services to send their own training materials. This, she suggested, could be a first step to creating some guidelines for women's information services, instead of attempting the impossible task of combining all services' experiences into one book.
- One participant suggested the creation of a website where people could post their experiences and read the stories of others - perhaps linked to the Mapping the World website.
- Marjet Douze of the IIAV suggested that the Know How Conference listserv be used as a similar kind of forum for women's information staff to exchange their knowledge and experiences.

The final conclusions of the workshop discussion were as follows:

1) A set of general guidelines for establishing women's information services needs to be created.
2) The Know How Conference listserv could and should be used as a place to post guidelines, share ideas, and hold discussions on establishing and running women's information services around the world.
3) A system of partnerships and exchanges between the staff of women's information centers needs to occur, as a way of sharing concrete, practical experience.

These conclusions were to be brought to the conference organizing committee that evening, at the conference's closing ceremony.

minutes taken by Sarah Wilson

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