Beginnings:
At the January 10, 1992 ACRL/NEC Board Meeting, Wendy Thomas (Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College) and Alexa Mayo (Holy Cross College) presented a proposal for the establishment of a Women's Studies Interest Group within the Chapter. The Board voted unanimously for its creation. (ACRL/NEC News, no. 64, Spring 1992).

In that same issue of the newsletter there appeared the following announcement:

ACRL/NEC Announces Women's Studies Special Interest Group

The New England Chapter of ACRL has approved the formation of a special interest group in Women's Studies. This new interest group will focus on issues of collection building and reference in the interdisciplinary field of Women's Studies. Topics that the group plans to address include sharing resources , forming professional networks in this relatively new field of study, and spending money wisely to build strong Women's Studies collections. Also, the group plans to visit Women's Studies research collections in New England to learn more about what is available. All interested ACRL/NEC members are encouraged to join. The first meeting of the Women's Studies special interest group will be held at the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe College on April 10, 1992 at 3:00 PM. For more information, contact either Wendy Thomas or Alexa Mayo. Topics for discussion or ideas for activities and projects are also encouraged.

 

Minutes from the May 13, 1992 ACRL/NEC Board Meeting report that 18 people attended the April 10 meeting (ACRL/NEC News, no. 65, Summer 1992).

 

August 25, 1992 Report

The Women's Studies Interest Group continues to grow; we now have 43 people on our mailing list.

New Words Bookstore, August 18, 1992. 

On August 18, 1992, twenty members of the Women's Studies Interest Group met at New Words, New England's largest women's bookstore. Located in the Inman Square area of Cambridge, New Words stocks over 15,000 titles by and about women, including women's fiction and poetry, biography, feminist theory, health, history, and lesbian politics. The bookstore was founded in 1974 and has always been run by an all-woman collective.

 

Two of the collective members, Gilda Bruckman and Laura Zimmerman, spoke to the Group and described the history of the bookstore, the changes in feminist publishing over the last two decades, and ways in which New Words serves as a women's resource center for the local feminist community. Much of the discussion involved the process of ordering books for a bookstore: how to select material, how to find and work with a good distributor, how to decide the number of copies to purchase, etc. After the presentation, Women's Studies Interest Group members were able to browse in the bookstore after closing time.

 

Alexa Mayo and I are working on two activities/meetings to be held next fall and early in winter. First, we are talking to Paula Mark, Bibliographic Instruction Librarian at UMASS/Amherst, who would like to meet with the group and discuss women's studies in Australia and New Zealand, We hope to schedule this meeting, which will probably include a tour of UMASS's library, in September or October. We have several members from the western part of the state, and this would give them an opportunity to participate.

 

Next, the group plans to visit the Boston Women's Health Book Collective in January or February. The Collective maintains a reference library and produces the popular women's health book, Our Bodies, Our Selves. One of the Women's Studies Interest Group members is the librarian for the collective, and she has offered to host a meeting/tour in their offices.

 

Wendy Thomas, Co-Chair, Women's Studies Interest Group

 

 

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