Database”, Scout Report, Vol. 4 No. 45, March 13, 1998
(http://scout.cs.wisc.edu/scout/report/archive/scout‐980313.html#6 ‐ viewed 3 March 2000)
gender Inn is a searchable bibliographic database providing access to over 6,000 secondary literature records in the subject areas of feminist theory, literary criticism, and gender studies focusing on English and American literature. Owing to the vast amount of information being written on this topic, the database creators have decided to limit the content of this particular database to monographs and essay collections. Journal articles are only included in special cases. The database is available for searching in both English and German. Originally created by Professor Natascha Wurzbach of the English Department, University of Cologne, who collected and recorded all bibliographic records, the database was further developed in 1990 with the use of a specially designed feminist thesaurus and the computerization of the data.
By 1996, with the co‐operation of the Regional Computing Centre (RRZK) at the university, the data were transferred using LIDOS into a machine‐readable format allowing, for the first time, online Internet research capabilities. An interdisciplinary project between the English Department and the Department of Art and Design created the Web site with which we now view and search the contents of gender Inn. Search capabilities were made possible using freeWAIS and WWW‐interface SFgate. gender Inn was made available to the public on February 3 1997. In April 1999 the project moved to the chair of Professor Beate Neumeier. The current team is Sabine Glöckner, Simone Kurtzke (project manager) and Annika Monsees. While the database claims that it updates its information continually, it is slightly disturbing to note that the last update was made on March 31 1999.
The name “gender Inn” comes from the combination of the two departments’ ideas on what this database means. It is best explained through the Web site’s help page:
The design and name of this database are the result of an interdisciplinary project conducted in co‐operation with the Department of Art and Design at the Fachhochschule Köln. The English word Inn is used to imply hospitality, openness or, more generally, a place to meet. In
addition, “inn” is a German suffix which is often used to mark the female sex (when referring to professions). Thus: “lehrer” (male teacher) and “lehrerin” (female teacher), and the plural form“lehrerinnen” (female teachers). Feminist linguists have suggested a different practice: Rather than using the form “inn” in order to append, as it were, the female to the male they have suggested the spelling “lehrerInnen” (with capital “I”) as a generic term, denoting both the female and male sex. As yet, this form remains fairly rare in everyday German usage. It goes without saying that gender Inn is keen to foster its wider use.
The main page of gender Inn is clean and well laid out. Links to the main functions of the database include Home, Help, Info, Research, Thesaurus, and Weblinks. There is also a link to the German version of the page from the English page and vice versa. The Help pages are exactly that ‐ helpful. This is a pleasant surprise from most help sheets.
Not only do the Help pages provide information on how the database was created, they also provide guidance on searching gender Inn and tips on how to make use of the thesaurus. There is also a page describing how the various Web links are selected. The information pages provide a more in‐depth explanation of the development of the database and its history. Technical details about the programs used to create the database are also provided.
The research page is where the actual search program is held. You are presented with two options: a simple or an advanced query. The simple query is a basic single box in which you can input your terms. The advanced query allows for more flexibility with two text boxes which can be combined using the logical operators of AND and OR (NOT is not provided).
Boolean searching is also available in the simple query, but checking the help sheets for the proper method of searching is advisable. Both of the text boxes in the advanced query can also be made field‐specific, the options being complete text, author, title, abstract, thesaurus or publisher. There are further options for year of publication, number of results to return, and how to display results (table or bibliographic reference). Exact phrase searching is done with quotation marks, and the asterisk is used as the truncation symbol.
Results of a search are first presented in a brief list providing the author, date and title of the item, whether it is a book or chapter within a book. This list does not seem to be sorted in any order and would be improved if results could be retrieved in reverse chronology. From this brief list, citations can be selected to view the full citation with the relevant information to find the item. In the full citation, the author, title information and date are repeated as well as the keywords describing the content of the article and the source of the item.
No database‐specific saving/printing/e‐mailing functions are provided, so using the browser’s capabilities is the only option of capturing the data. Providing a proper data capturing facility from the database itself would be another improvement.
Another full suite of pages is dedicated to the explanation and lists of headings of the thesaurus. The use of a thesaurus, in the case of this database, has allowed for a much more focused retrieval of items.
Up to 20 keywords are assigned to every document using the feminist thesaurus. By taking the time to analyse each document to this extent, the quality of retrieval is an improvement over that found in other similar types of freely accessible databases on the Web. The thesaurus is divided into five major categories: empirical context; communication within the literary system; feminism; literature: approaches and theories; sources of information, and additional keywords.
The structure of the feminist thesaurus used for indexing the database’s records is based on S.J. Schmidt’s Empirical Theory of Literature. While the purpose of the thesaurus makes searching more specific, it also tends to make it more difficult. In attempting a search for strictly Canadian items, this reviewer is still baffled how to retrieve results. A search on “Canada” as a keyword retrieves only seven items. By checking the thesaurus under additional keywords, a nationality indicator of “CAN” is listed. However, searching this term in quotation marks retrieves no items. Obviously, a little more instruction on how to apply these thesaurus terms properly is needed.
Lastly, the Weblinks page provides an annotated list of potentially useful Web sites in the subject area of gender and women’s studies. This list is broken into sub‐headings of searchable databases, metapages and bibliographies, and reading lists.
Overall, this product will be very useful for students and researchers in this focused area of gender studies. While the database does have a few bugs, these can be overcome and the resources found are well worth the effort.
