Women’s Information Network Europe (WINE) in cooperation with IFLA Women, Information and Libraries Special Interest Group (WIL), invite colleagues to submit proposals for its satellite conference to be held at University of Tampere, Finland, 8th to 10th August 2012.

Conference Theme

How can libraries and information centres improve access to women’s information and preserve women’s cultural heritage?

Scope / Objectives of the Conference

The Conference aims to discuss:

• ways libraries and information centres provide access to women, human rights and gender information
• ways to preserve women’s cultural heritage
• the role of libraries and information centres in the internet era, and the role of the internet in democratising access to women’s information and information for women

Papers can cover a wide range of related areas including:

1) Collection strategies

• Collection strategies of mainstream: whose histories are we collecting, and for whom are we collecting them?
• New directions: How do we shape collections so that they serve future diverse generations?
• Libraries and archives as knowledge producers
• Oral history projects
• Strategies for collecting and preserving the memories of migrant and refugee women

2) Providing access to women’s or gender information

• Tools to promote access to and enable exchange of women’s or gender information
• Thesauri, anthologies, tags, gender mainstreaming classification schemes
• Good practices in providing access to women’s and gender information
• Dissemination of gendered information in a globalised world

3) Libraries/information centres and new media in a gendered world:

• The changing function of libraries in the Internet era
• Dealing with the new media: challenge or opportunity?
• Digital information centres as a solution to financial and distribution challenges
• The digital gap, gender and development
• Developing digital libraries
• The role of social networks

Submission Guidelines

Proposals to be submitted by email to wilsig@googlemail.com including:

• Title of the paper
• Abstract of approximately 150 words, summarising the paper
• 3-6 keywords
• Speaker’s name, professional affiliation, postal address, email address and brief biographical note.

Proposals will be reviewed by a selection panel chaired by the Women, Information and Libraries Special Interest Group Convener in cooperation with WINE. Papers and presentations should be unpublished, original works. IFLA has first publication rights to papers selected.

Conference presentations will be made in English. They will be no longer than 20 minutes, with extra time for discussion at the end of the session.

All expenses, including registration for the conference, travel and accommodation are the responsibility of the presenters. No financial support can be provided by IFLA.

Letters of invitation can be issued to presenters upon request.

First-time presenters and new professionals are specially encouraged to apply.

Deadlines:

31st January 2012: Submission of abstracts

21st February 2012: Notification of acceptance (if you haven’t heard by this date you can assume that your proposal has not been successful this time)

Further information:

For further information about the conference go to the conference website

Women Information Network Europe (WINE)

Tilly Vriend (Aletta, Institute for Women’s History, The Netherlands) , T.Vriend@Aletta.nu

Sari Pikkala ( Minna, Finland)

Women, Information and Libraries Special Interest Group (WIL)

Maria Cotera  (Convener, Women, Information and Libraries Special Interest Group )

wilsig@googlemail.com

 

This year our 46th conference of  German-language lesbian/women’s libraries, archives and documentation centers will take place from 03rd until 06th of  November 2011 in Bolzano/Italy. For the first time ever the meeting is organised by a women’s archive in a German speaking area from North Italy. The “Women’s Archive / Archivio storico delle donne” was founded in 2003. The archive has now prepared an exhibition with the title “Women’s movement  70 / Frammenti di storia del movimento femminista in Alto Adige” to be opened and discussed during our conference.
Our umbrella organization “i.d.a.” have joined organisations from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Luxembourg an Italy. Together with women from other archives and libraries in Italy we will discuss this year about the central theme “Women’s movement in the archive?“ /„Il movimento femminista negli archivi storici delle donne?” In addition we organized many working groups, readings, an archive tour and historical town walks.

Dear WINE members in all European countries,
we are around 50 members in our network. That’s why I am using our weblog to send around this invitation to join ATGENDER. Whoever can find out out how many membership based associations or organisations exist in our country?  Please, send this invitation to all women’s/gender archives, libraries and documentation centers in your country and support the campaign to strengthen ATGENDER. Our windows are open for new members.

What is this campaign about?

During the ATGENDER Spring Conference in Utrecht in April,  2011 a meeting was held at which ATGENDER members discussed the issues concerning National Associations membership. It was decided that ATGENDER should concentrate on associations committed to the aims of ATGENDER regarding:
- Gender & Women’s Studies, Feminist Research and related fields (such as postcolonial, migration, anti-racism, queer, sexualities, labour & care studies, masculinities)
- Documentation (librarians, documentation & information specialists, women’s centers)
- Gender Equality & Diversity (equal opportunity agents, women’s and feminist activists, HR, employers).

The group agreed that it is crucial to unite such associations and that a focused effort should be made to increase the number of National Associations’ membership.

Please, send information about existing membership based organized association/organisations in your country with the address and/or homepage to get in contact with ATGENDER. It could be an Association of Women’s/Gender Studies or a section of Women’s/Gender Studies in an association of a special discipline like Sociology or Journalism or Computer Science etc.

With the beginning of summer 2011 the ATGENDER Board decided to launch a campaign aimed to introduce many of the National Associations connected with gender and feminist research to  ATGENDER, a growing European association. More information about this project and about ATGENDER you find on the website and especially in the 11^th newsletter.

Feel free to contact any of the following board members:
in German -  Patricia Treusch (pat_treusch@yahoo.com),
in Italian – Sveva Magaraggia (sveva.magaraggia@unimib.it),
in Bulgarian – Nadezhda Alexandrova (n.alexandrova@dir.bg) and
in Dutch – Berteke Waaldijk (m.l.waaldijk@uu.nl) or
in English, with any question: info@atgender.eu.

The EIGE – The European Institute for Gender Equality’s Resource Centre the Resource and Documentation Centre – consultation Meeting with WINE took place the 23rd & 24th of May 2011 in Vilnius: the consultation resulted in a proposal for a pilot project and some concrete steps to implement it.

The European Institute for Gender Equality’s Resource and Documentation Centre (RDC) consists of a physical library in Vilnius and a global online catalogue containing digital documentation resources.

Based on the classification system for books and on-line documentation, developed during 2011, relevant literature on gender issues will be collected, encoded and made available for the public and interested parties from Member States and accession or candidate countries.

One aim for the RDC is to host a platform of already existing information/resource centres and libraries on gender equality in Europe offering a single point of access to their resources through one common search engine, reference service, bibliographical database and keywords from the European Women’s Thesaurus.

In order to avoid overlapping and to disseminate the resources in existing documentation centres and data bases, the Institute aims to develop standard requirements enabling searching and uploading external data stored at various information and resource centres on relevant studies, reports and research.

The collections will cover gender related policies and practices, tools, methods and good practices of gender mainstreaming in Member States, accession and candidate countries, EU institutions, research excellence on gender equality, good practice materials and reports produced by institutions of civil society.

Following the high quality assurance criteria, the RDC will store EU legislation, policy documents, research reports, scientific books, journals and other publications, statistics, best practices, case studies, proceedings, dictionaries, directories, glossaries, etc.

The services will be available to European and national policy-makers, researchers, social partners, gender practitioners, training and research institutes, universities, students as well as the general public. EIGE makes a questionnaire to the WINE network asking information on the technical systems they are using and the type of collection they have.

Five Resource Centres/Libraries are chosen – with different technical systems and different types of collections to maximise the learning from the pilot project. The pilot will focus on collections on Gender Based Violence (GBV).

During the implementation regular evaluation will take place, with the five chosen but also with a larger circle of the WINE network.

Questionnaire to WINE members:

1.Which ILS solutions do you use? Name + short description of system indicating  system’s environment (Windows, Unix )

2.Do you have other kind of databases (e.g. digital collections) or  web-based/digital resources (e.g. portals) If so, what type of formats are they?

3.Could you please indicate what cataloguing rules/standard do you use in your library/documentation centre? in which format data can be exported ?(MARC 21, Dublin Core, ) is the catalogue  using open standards  allowing automatic harvesting ?

4.Could you please indicate what indexing/classification system  do you use in your library/documentation centre? If this is an in-house system, could you provide us with a copy? 5.Could you give us a global estimate of number of documents collected under GBV or under any violence-related topics in relation with your indexing system?

6.What different types of documents under GBV do you collect – books, articles, films, music, video, cartoon etc.

7. What is the main language you use for indexing/keywords?

The Berlin Network of Women’s, Lesbian and Gender Libraries invites all interested people to the 1. Long Night of Libraries during the 100. Library Conference in Berlin.

We offer:

• Our Poster with the title “Which gaps do women’s libraries bridge?” (which we’ll present during the conference as well),
• presentations of our Berlin network, our umbrella organisation i.d.a.  and our international cooperation with WINE,
• A documentary film about “Gender in Libraries”, produced by Danilo Vetter (Gender Studies Student at Humboldt-University)
• A test in gender sensitive speaking and a book sale.

Maybe someone is in Berlin that time (08.06.2011, 18-22:00) and can visit our event in the Gender Library (Axel-Springer-Str. 54b, Berlin-Mitte, near U2 Spittelmarkt).

The next General Assembly meeting and new board elections will at the ATGENDER spring conference ‘Feminist Heritages – Feminist Futures’ (Utrecht April 8-9-10) in Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Supported by the Center for Humanities, Donna Haraway, has kindly offered to give a key note at the conference.
Wine hopes to see many of you at the the workshop on “Information and Dissemination: infrastructures and networks in Europe and Beyond”, Tilly Vriend and Sara de Jong (Aletta) will present a paper on the Fragen project at the workshop.

More information and details about the Spring Conference “Feminist Legacies, Feminist Futures” on the AtGender website can be found here.

See you in Utrecht!

Recently I heard from Ursula Nienhaus (FFBIZ, Berlin) that the website of the project FRAGEN (FRAmes on GENder) is already online. I looked at the page and found out, that the texts are read- and searchableable.  29 countries delivered their texts about the second wave of women’s movement in Europe. Please spread the news about this online-collection and database among your users.

Many thanks to all the specialists in the 29 countries for finding, discussing and preparing the documents with all the information around the texts. And I wish them many success for continuing the project to our all purpose.

It is about time to give you an update of activities within WINE. Let me start at the ATGENDER/ATHENA transition meeting on November 25/26 at Amazone in Brussels. Maria Grönroos (KILDEN) and I were invited to represent WINE.
On Thursday 25/11 the ‘ Tuning brochure’ was launched, the last publication, produced within Athena 3. The publication can be ordered at the Utrecht Athena/AtGender office. info@atgender.eu Several people gave speeches; there was a panel discussion, but for me the keynote speech by Zita Gurmai (member of European Parliament) was the highlight of the afternoon. 
On Friday 26/11 Maria and I participated in the Taskforce meeting of coordinators of former ATHENA working groups. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss in which way we could continue our Athena activities within ATGENDER. We expressed the wish to continue to work as an autonomous and transversal group on women/gender information issues.
ATGENDER will focus on: research streams, publish books; organize conferences, cooperate with national associations of women/gender-studies and women/gender information centers. Next year ATGENDER will organize a spring conference ‘ Feminist Legacies, Feminist futures’ on April 8-10, 2011 in Utrecht. This conference will create an opportunity for WINE members to meet and discuss plans for cooperation. So mark these days in your agenda! The call for this conference will soon be posted. Note: Donna Haraway will give a keynote! One of the strands is on information and dissemination. All personal members within ATGENDER can apply for funding to attend this meeting!
Reminder:women and gender information centers, who have a very limited budget, can apply for a fee-waver to become an AtGender member! We advice all of you to become members, to be able to have a strong voice in this network and to benefit from the advantages a membership can offer you! There was no news concerning the nominations for the ATGENDER board-election; the election of the new board will take place at the Utrecht spring conference.
ALL in all it was a successful meeting, which marked a new beginning for cooperation within ATGENDER. Best wishes from Tilly Vriend, Aletta, Institute for Women’s History

Take a look at our new list of peer reviewed journals in the field of gender research.

This is a list of about 165 peer reviewed journals within the broad field of women’s studies and gender research, which publish articles in English. First journals from the Nordic countries of Europe are listed, followed by journals from all over the world.

KvinnSam – the Swedish National Resource Library for Gender Studies – has over the last years created web portals on different aspects of women’s history. We are happy to announce that we have now translated all of them into English. The themes are Suffrage, Knowledge, Work, Peace and Second Wave Feminism. The portals contain historical surveys written by researchers, biographies, photos, etc.

You will find them on http://www.ub.gu.se/kvinn/portaler/