The Gerritsen Collection of Aletta H. Jacobs, containing nearly two million pages of material, provides a wealth of primary and secondary sources for understanding women's social, political, legal, and health issues through time, and for following the development of feminist thought, especially in Europe, the British Commonwealth, and the US. The collection of books, pamphlets and periodicals spans the sixteenth century to the fourth decade of the twentieth century. The collection was originally created by Dr Aletta H. Jacobs, the first woman physician in The Netherlands, and her husband, C.V. Gerritsen. It was owned by the John Crerar Library and sold to the University of Kansas in 1954 (Sharistanian et al., 1976). The original collection has been supplemented with other materials from other libraries (Marcin, 2007). First made available in microform in the 1970s, the collection has now been converted to digital format.
The collection consists of periodicals and monographs (books and pamphlets). The bulk of the monograph collection is in English (over 2,330 titles), but there are also around 920 titles in German, over 730 in French, and over 470 in other languages, with English summaries for the non‐English items. MARC records are available. Although libraries may own individual monograph or periodical titles, many of the works, especially those published before the twentieth century, have been very rare in the US. Some titles may be available on interlibrary loan, or from the internet Archive, Hathi Trust, or other digital repositories. One value of the Gerritsen Collection is that it allows rapid, efficient access to a variety of primary and secondary sources, making it a good resource for instruction.
The collection features over 260 periodical titles, many of them published between 1860 and 1900, many of them rare. When possible, Gerritsen's original collection has been supplemented with additional numbers to make many of the periodical runs complete. Each periodical title record includes a durable URL.
The collection has overlapping subject categories: Biographies and Autobiographies, Health and Well‐Being, Women and Work, Law, Literature, Business, Education, Fine and Applied Arts (including costume design), and Foreign Languages. Extensive search and browsing features include both the original Gerritsen subject classes, and Library of Congress subject headings. Records returned by a search can be arranged by relevance or date as well as by author or title, and can be filtered by periodical or monograph format. Users can also filter periodical results for more precise formats, including letters, obituaries, statistics, poetry, editorial cartoons, and even recipes. Individual items may be downloaded as TIFF or PDF files, and page images can be printed. Users can add individual item records, or groups of records, to a My Research folder for further reference, or export them to a bibliographic citation manager.
Extensive introductory notes for the sections are available within the database, along with descriptive handouts about the major categories such as feminism. An Excel spreadsheet listing both monograph and periodical titles is available and a set of PowerPoint slides illustrating the major features of the Gerritsen Collection are available at the at the Gerritsen website: http://gerritsen.chadwyck.com/marketing/demo.jsp.
Because it is strong in primary and historical resources and provides access to research materials from a long time span, The Gerritsen Collection is recommended for large public libraries and for academic libraries supporting undergraduate and graduate research and teaching in women's history, gender and women's studies, economic history, political science, anthropology journalism, popular culture, sociology, literature, and the history of medicine and of law.
