Preserving the Literature of Women's and Gender Organizations: The Availability of Newsletters in Libraries, Commercial Online Databases, and Organizational Web sites

The article attempts to discover the availability of print newsletters created by women's and gender organizations in libraries, as well as to reveal whether text versions of these newsletters exist in commercial online databases and on the Web sites of women's and gender studies organizations. The author researched a sample set of newsletters produced by twenty-nine national and international organizations to find answers to the following questions: How many libraries hold print copies of these newsletters? Do any women's and gender studies databases include these newsletters, and if so, do any databases provide access to the texts of these publications? Do the Web sites of these organizations provide online access to the newsletters, and if so, are the Web sites archiving any part of them? Organizations were chosen based on several criteria. The results of the study revealed that such newsletters are not systematically being preserved. The author provides several solutions to counter this problem so that this vital literature will not be lost.