June 25, 2003 American Women: A Gateway for the Study of Women's History Debuts

New American Memory Web Presentation Is Online Version Augmented With Links to Resources

Contact: Guy Lamolinara (202) 707-9217
Website: https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/awhhtml/

"American Women: A Gateway to Library of Congress Resources for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States" is the newest presentation from American Memory, the Library's Web site of 8 million digital items. "American Women" can be accessed at https://www.loc.gov.

Designed as a first stop for Library of Congress researchers working in the field of U.S. women's history, "American Women" provides easy entrée to an online version of the Library's recently published women's history resource guide. It also contains links to Web documents that offer:

  • practical advice on preparing for a research trip to the Library of Congress;
  • tips on how to search the Library's catalogs and finding aids specifically for women's history resources;
  • an overview of the Library's American Memory collections and how to find
  • helpful orientations to women's history sources in the Library's online exhibitions and its audiovisual Web broadcasts of lectures, readings and symposia sponsored by the institution.

The core of the new site is the expanded and now fully searchable version of "American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States," a 2001 print publication that has been redesigned for online use, with added illustrations and links to digitized material throughout the Library's Web site, including some material newly digitized especially for "American Women."

The Web site's authors have provided practical search tips (many of which are applicable to research in other libraries), detailed collection summaries, links to fuller online catalog record descriptions and links to digitized material from the Library's book, newspaper, periodical, law, rare book, manuscript, print, photograph, map, music, recorded sound, moving image, American folklife and foreign-language collections. An introductory essay by historian Susan Ware gives a historiographical overview of research trends within the field of American women's history.

"American Women" is an innovative addition to American Memory. The site will be updated continually as new subject approaches to women are explored, additional items and collections on women are identified and digitized, and new programs on women's themes are videotaped for public broadcasting over the Internet.

American Memory is a project of the National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress. Its more than 100 collections, which range from papers of the U.S. presidents, Civil War photographs and early films of Thomas Edison to papers documenting the women's suffrage and civil rights movements, Jazz Age photographs and the first baseball cards, include 8 million items from the Library of Congress and other major repositories. The latest Web site from the Library is the monthly "Wise Guide" (https://www.loc.gov/wiseguide) magazine, which demonstrates that "It's Fun to Know History."

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PR 03-122
2003-06-26
ISSN 0731-3527