Collections Supporting Women's Studies Majors in the United States

Women's studies, because it is highly interdisciplinary and because its materials are often published by small, lesser-known presses, is a notoriously difficult field for which to collect. However, this complexity of collection does nothing to diminish the responsibility of an academic library to support a women's studies program. This study provides an overview of the quality of collection of women's studies materials at ten academic libraries through the list-checking method, sampling from three distinct bibliographies. A comparison of these results to the size of the women's studies programs at those institutions, determined by the number of courses offered by those programs, is used to see whether or not there is a correlation between the size of a women's studies program and the collection relevant to the field