Summer 98

by Joan Korenman

I’m fed up with search engines! In theory, they’re great.
You send your web browser to, say, Alta Vista or
HotBot , give the search engine some keywords you’re looking for, and click on “search.” In a matter of seconds, the search engine will return a large number of “hits” - web sites and specific documents containing the keywords you’ve chosen. The trouble is, it’s not so simple, especially when you’re looking for women-related material.

Let’s say you want to find some good comprehensive web sites dealing with women- focused issues, or perhaps websites of particular interest to young women and girls. You go to Alta Vista and type in the keywords “women or girls.” Almost instantly, Alta Vista displays its results. It tells you that your search has produced “about 13,000,384 matches,” and here are the first ten. Thirteen MILLION matches! Today’s young women and girls will be grandmothers before you work your way through all those hits. Eventually, you come to your senses and realize that you needn’t examine all the matches; in fact, you may find what you’re looking for among the ten Alta Vista displays on the page.

The first hit looks promising, a report broadcast over Monitor Radio about “where we are thirty years after the beginning of the modern women’s movement.” Unfortunately, it requires audio plug-ins that you don’t have, so you run your eyes down the rest of the list of ten hits. One is a Korean sixth grade student’s report on clothing for women and girls in ancient Rome. All the others are XXX sleaze (And I’ve been recommending Alta Vista to my students!)

Dismayed, you switch to HotBot, another popular, highly regarded search engine. You run your search again. This time, all ten of the first set of matches are sex sites! (Is that why Hot Bot is so popular?) Now, to be honest, it is possible to construct search engine queries so that they’ll return a more manageable number and a somewhat better class of hits. But even with finely tuned queries, you’re still likely to find that a number of the search engine’s hits produce messages like “404: File Not Found.” And sometimes, the site may still exist but the information it contains is outdated and useless, or in spite of your best efforts, utterly irrelevant.

There’s got to be a better way, you say? Well, with all due modesty, I think there is: the women’s studies resources on the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) Women’s Studies web site
(www.umbc.edu/wmst/ ) .
I established this site in 1994. At the time, I was director of UMBC’s Women’s Studies Program, and I wanted to enhance the Program’s visibility on campus and in the Baltimore area.. I included some links to related academic resources, both to make the site more useful to visitors and to demonstrate to some of my skeptical colleagues that Women’s Studies is a worldwide phenomenon. The site has grown enormously since 1994. It’s now a great starting place for anyone looking for high quality, up-to-date information about women-related online resources. Currently, it contains the following pages:

• Gender-Related Electronic Forums

  www.umbc.edu/wmst/forums.html
  Annotated, frequently-updated listing of more than 400 women- or gender-related email lists. In addition to the main listing, there are currently sixteen topical sub-sections to make it easier to find women-focused lists in the following areas:
  

  Activism Age-Defined Arts & Humanities Business/Finance Education Health International Internet Information

  Motherhood/Pregnancy Religion/Spirituality Science &Technology Sexuality/Sexual Orientation Social Sciences Sports & Recreation Women of Color Women’s Studies

  Gender-Related Electronic Forums has won a bunch of awards (she says, blushing modestly). It offers information you simply can’t find in any one place elsewhere.

• Women’s Studies/Women’s Issues Resource Sites

  www.umbc.edu/wmst/links.html
  

  This selective, frequently-updated listing, which earned Argus Clearinghouse’s highest rating (5 out of 5), includes annotated links to more than 300 information-rich web sites. In addition to the main listing, there are currently twelve topical sub-sections to make it easier to find women-focused sites in the following areas:

  Activism Arts & Humanities Multi-disciplinary Girls & Young Women Sexuality/Sexual Orientation International

  Internet Information Online Periodicals Religion/Spirituality Science & Technology Health Women of Color

  
  

• WMST-L: Women’s Studies Email List

  www.umbc.edu/wmst/wmst-l_index.html
  

  Information primarily about WMST-L, an academic e-mail list for discussion of Women’s studies teaching, research, and program administration. The section includes the following:

  • Information about WMST-L
  • How to find someone’s e-mail address
  • WMST-L User’sGuide
  • Debunking computer virus myths
  • How to search the WMST-L archives
  • Guides to citing online information
  • WMST-L syllabi collection

• Women’s Studies Programs, Departments, and Research Centers

  www.umbc.edu/wmst/programs.html
  Links to more than 370 Women’s Studies programs, departments, and research centers all over the world. Annotations identify programs offering graduate degrees in Women’s Studies.

  Internet Resources on Women: Updates Page

  www.umbc.edu/wmst/updates.html
  Updates site for my book, Internet Resources on Women, though I’ve tried to make it useful as well for people without the book who want to keep up with new and changed women-related academic resources. Arranged by topic/chapter, with a listing as well of the past month’s additions and changes. Chapter topics include E-mail, E-mail Lists (listed by discipline), Other Internet Info Tools, Women-Related Web Resources (listed by discipline), Gaining Internet Access, and For More Information (listed by topic).

• Financial Aid and Job Opportunities in Women’s Studies

  www.umbc.edu/wmst/jobsetc.html
  Links to a few selected websites offering information about financial aid for women and internships and job opportunities in Women’s studies.

  If you don’t find what you’re looking for among the resources on the UMBC Women’s Studies web site, or you’d just like some different perspectives on what’s out there, you might take a look at UMBC’s rather selective listing of other comprehensive women-related sites
  www.umbc.edu/wmst/links_genl.html
  It includes such excellent sites as
  

  • The Feminist Majority Online
    www.feminist.org/
  • The University of Wisconsin System Women’s Studies Librarian’s Office
    www.library.wisc.edu/libraries/WomensStudies/
  • The Women’s Studies Archive on InforM
    www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/WomensStudies/
  • The Association of College and Research Libraries’ WSSLINKS
    www.library.yale.edu/
  • and several others, along with two very useful women-focused search engines,
    Femina
    http://femina.cybergrrl.com/
    
  • and WWWomen
    www.wwwomen.com/

What? Women-focused search engines? Why didn’t I mention them sooner, you ask? One reason, of course, is that I wanted to call attention to the outrageous results a query about women’s resources is likely to produce on such well-known search engines as AltaVista and HotBot. Also, for some things, the women-focused engines may not be as useful as the UMBC Women’s Studies site.

For example, if you’re looking for women-related email lists and you search on the keywords “email lists” in Femina, you’ll get a few individual lists and lots of irrelevant hits. In WWWomen, your search will produce very few hits. Neither engine will include Gender- Related Electronic Forums among its hits, even though both include it in their database (and, in fact, WWWomen highly recommends it elsewhere on their site). But both Femina and WWWomen apparently assign sites a very limited set of keywords; this can turn your search into a frustrating guessing game.

If you know you’re looking for, say, women-related email lists, or women’s studies programs, or high-quality women-related sites dealing with science and technology, arts and humanities, or women of color, you may find what you’re looking for most quickly at the UMBC Women’s Studies site. If, on the other hand, you’d like to sample a wide range of interesting women-related sites, including (but not limited to) those dealing with parenting, travel, entertainment personalities, shopping, food, hobbies, and other topics unlikely to be included in UMBC’s more academically-oriented selection, then Femina and WWWomen are terrific places to begin your search. Either way, you can conduct your search without fear of encountering the sleaze merchants who can make looking for women-related Internet material so unpleasant. Happy hunting!

Joan Korenman korenman@umbc.edu

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