Women Online

Book excerpt: Women Online focuses on the problems of investigating interdisciplinary topics in women's studies, working with controlled vocabularies and inconsistent indexing, and locating feminist scholarship. The authoritative contributors to the book not only analyze these problems in general terms but also suggest practical strategies for making online research more effective and productive. The sixteen chapters in this much-needed book are organized into three broad categories covering disciplines, such as humanities and social sciences; format of the material covered, such as non-bibliographic and cited reference databases; and specific topics, such as lesbian studies and women of color. Chapter authors employ a variety of useful methods to analyze issues of coverage and content. They compare the results of controlled vocabulary and free-text or full-text searching and make use of search examples, cited reference and multi-file searching, and bibliometric techniques, including analysis of recall, precision, overlap, relevancy, uniqueness, and trends in file growth. The Database Matrix provides an alphabetical listing of files discussed in the book and serves as a directory for online research in women's studies. Women Online will be useful to librarians, scholars, and students who search databases, as well as to producers who design and market them.