Petition for “L’Homme. Z.F.G.” and the “Sammlung Frauennachlässe” in Vienna

From last Monday until yesterday I stayed in Vienna to research in the archive STICHWORT and to celebrate the 20th aniversary of ARIADNE at the National Library. So I  had the opportunity to visit the women of both institutions in Vienna yesterday. They are overwhelmed by the mass of people who have already signed the online petition: „L’Homme. European Journal of Feminist History” (“L’Homme. Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft”) and the “Collection of Women’s Personal Papers” (Sammlung Frauennachlässe) at the Department of History of the University of Vienna have been continually developed and expanded for more than 20 years with much enthusiasm and expertise, unpaid work and public money from the national and provincial governments as well as the university.
The more people sign the petition the more the the ministry and university have to recognise how important and unique the archive and the journal are for the scientific community as well as for the cultural heritage. So, dear WINE-members all around Europe, please, sign this online petition! You’ll also find an English translation on the website.

Students of gender studies are expected to know their way around libraries and archives when searching for information, but are rarely invited to critically reflect on the way these political, gendered knowledge spaces are actively involved in knowledge production practices. Whilst feminist standpoint theory with its recognition that knowledge(s) are situated is now commonplace, libraries and archives have so far escaped critical attention as both knowledge producers in their own right and as constituted by technologies of knowledge. The conventional understanding of libraries and archives as depositories and repositories of knowledge has not yet been structurally interrogated from a feminist perspective, and there is little emphasis on libraries as locations and as subjects and objects of political and social knowledge regimes.

This volume aims to fill that gap, by offering a consideration of (women’s) libraries and archives form different and complementary perspectives. The book will provide inspiration and guidance to teachers of gender studies and assist them in navigating with their students through the complex situationality of the library and archive. The goal of the volume is to ‘open the black box of the library’ through combining and connecting theoretical questions concerning power, knowledge and gender to feminist library practices. It will aim to make teachers aware of the analogies between the histories and practices of gender studies and women’s libraries and archives, and of the questions and challenges involved in preserving and disseminating feminist knowledge. It will showcase the library as a lively, fast changing, and thoroughly political space with which students can be taught to engage both critically and creatively, and within which lies embedded the possibility of a multitude of feminist practices.

The book will be divided in three thematic sections. In the first section Legacies/Histories, libraries and archives will be presented in and through the historical legacies of knowledge production in general, and feminist knowledge practices in particular. The second section Practices provides a showcase of current library practices indicating how the knowledge/power nexus is embedded in these practices. The last section Utopias will provide a glimpse of the library of the future and its new paradigms by linking the library to cutting-edge technologies and new perspectives, for example from science and technology studies. The volume will include an annex with references to relevant databases for gender studies teachers, students and researchers.

Contributions on the following issues are welcome:

• the intersections between gender, race, class, sexuality in the development of professional librarianship in Europe;
• the (historical and institutional) relationship between Gender Studies and women’s libraries; 
• the role of libraries and librarians in the production of cultural memory, identity and citizenship; 
• the library as cultural icon, metaphor and myth;
• theoretical engagements with the deployment of power/knowledge through archival practices in library spaces;
• new library paradigms: libraries as mediators, knowledge brokers, concrete examples of dilemma’s inherent to library work;
• practitioner insights into feminist librarianship;
• perspectives on transformations in/of library spaces and practices in relation to new technological developments, such as engagements with libraries as Actor Networks, the (il)legality of information sharing through virtual libraries, and the virtuality of librarianship in the 21st century.

Contributing scholars must be located in Europe. In order to ensure a good geographical spread, perspectives from Eastern and Southern Europe and Scandinavia are particularly welcome.

Contributions submitted must be original and unpublished accounts

Deadline for submissions: 10th April 2012
Internal review process: 15th of May 2012

Please forward your queries and submissions to both editors:

Sanne Koevoets, email s.koevoets@uu.nl
researcher & teacher in Gender Studies and New Media and Digital Culture at the department of Media and Cultural Studies, University of Utrecht, the Netherlands

Dr. Sara de Jong, email: s.dejong@aletta.nu
researcher, Aletta, Institute for Women’s History, the Netherlands

The volume is to be published in the book series ‘Teaching Gender’ of the Atgender Network

Information about the ‘Teaching Gender’ Book Series:
The ATHENA thematic network and ATGENDER bring together specialists in women’s and gender studies, feminist research, women’s rights, gender equality and diversity. In the book series ‘Teaching with Gender’ the partners in this network have collected articles on a wide range of teaching practices in the field of gender. The books in this series address challenges and possibilities of teaching about women and gender in a wide range of educational contexts. The authors discuss pedagogical, theoretical and political dimensions of learning and teaching on women and gender. Previous volumes have for example included ‘Teaching Empires’ and ‘Teaching Intersectionality’. More information about the Teaching Gender Book series can be found here: http://www.atgender.eu/index.php/initiativesmenu/teachingwgen

Dear colleagues,

We are addressing you in the name of the Department of Gender Studies at CEU, and of AtGender: The European Association for Gender Research, Education and Documentation, the organizers of the 8th European Feminist Research Conference “The Politics of Location Revisited: Gender@2012.” The conference will be held in Budapest May 17-20th 2012 at the premises of the Central European University.

The European Feminist Research Conference will bring together large number of academics and professionals in the field of women’s studies and gender studies (we expect 500 – 600 participants). Thus it is one of the best opportunities for all of us to learn more about the existing institutions across Europe which are involved in collecting and preserving women’s intellectual heritage

That is why we have planned to create a special exhibition of posters in which current work of women’s archives and women’s libraries will be presented. We are convinced that it will help promoting extremely valuable work of these organizations.

We cordially invite all Women and Gender libraries to participate in / or contribute to this exhibition. Even if you cannot participate in the conference, you can still forward your poster!

The poster should have a format of usual conference poster (pref. A2), with information concerning the current work of your institution. It will be exhibited in one of the main halls of CEU, where the conference will be held. Also, there will be a special time designated for presentation of all the posters.
Your poster can be only exhibited, or both exhibited and presented. In the case you want to have it presented we will have to ask your presenter to register for the conference.
If you want your poster to be listed in the printed conference program, the deadline to inform us about your wish to exhibit it is February 28, 2012. The same is the deadline for the registration of your presenter. In case of later registration, we can promise only to include your presentation in the final electronic version of the program.Furthermore, please note that the reduced early bird conference fee is available only until February 28, 2012.

The same two conditions apply to the reduced fees for scholars from post-communist countries and for students: they are only for AtGender members and available only during the early bird registration period. We will be very happy to have a poster of your institution as a part of this event.

For more information on the conference please check our website http://www.8thfeministconference.org/

You can also ask us anything you might be interested in.
Hoping to hear from you soon and to have your poster exhibited at the 8th European Feminist Research Conference “The Politics of Location Revisited: Gender@2012.”

For the Conference Committee, Jasmina Lukic, chair
lukicj@ceu.hu

For AtGender, Tilly Vriend, Board member for Women and Gender Libraries in Europe
T.Vriend@Aletta.nu

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.