The Women’s History in Archival Collections site is maintained by the Archives for Research on Women and Gender at the University of Texas at San Antonio. We do not pretend that this list of women’s history resources is exhaustive or complete. Many more libraries, archives and repositories hold primary source materials by and about women than are listed here. This list represents those institutions (that we are aware of) that have Internet sites indicating holdings of women’s organizations or of individual women. We have read these sites closely so as to find clues to sources about and by women, even when they are not highlighted by the creator of the Web page. We hope this site is of help to you in your research, and we welcome feedback and additions to these pages. We will strive to keep our information as current and accurate as possible by updating and adding to the site on a regular basis.
Jill U. Jackson, Archivist, is the one to whom comments and suggestions should be sent; and this reviewer, in contact with her, learned that she is the major author/compiler for the site. Jill began the site in 1996 with the assistance of Tori Beckman‐Wilson who used the Society of American Archivists’ Women’s Collections Directory as the core list for tracking down Web sites. The list is updated about three times a year; and Jill welcomes input from others. She can be reached at jillj@lonestar.jpl.utsa.edu As the introduction above indicates, but it bears repeating, the links are only to those sites which, in the description, identify collections as having content by or about women. In other words, unless a Web site identifies the women’s history content of a collection, it is not included in Women’s History in Archival Collections.
The Web pages at this site include listings for sites in 32 of the 50 states of the USA and the District of Columbia, along with 11 sites outside the USA, mostly in Canada, Australia and the British Isles. States such as Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington do not have listings as of the last date the page was checked. The author indicated an update is due soon. Each site has a brief (ten to 30 word) description of the archive’s content and a link to it. Bad links occurred for about 10 percent of the sites examined. The archives listed may be single‐purpose collections focusing on women’s issues and individual women, or broad collections which have identified individual women and women’s issues as a distinctive subset of the larger archives.
The link associated with a listing is usually to the home page of the archives. The organizations included are primarily university special collections and archives, state historical archives, and a variety of women’s organizations. Women’s History in Archival Collections provides a good sampling of archives about women’s history but is by no means complete, as the compiler indicates. However, the single focus of the listing and, therefore, the focused comments perhaps highlight women better than such general sources as Chadwyck‐Healey’s Archives USA (http://archives.chadwyck.com/). However, the lack of detailed indexing and its incomplete nature limit its usefulness. The Chadwyck‐Healey resource is a commercial for‐lease database, and is probably more appropriate for in‐depth research.
In both resources, the real value is in identifying those archival resources that probably must be visited in order to get the benefit of the collections. In only a few cases does Women’s History in Archival Collections link to archives with any significant portion of the collection online.
