The role and impact of library of congress classification on the assessment of women's studies collections

Abstract

Women's Studies is an interdisciplinary field with components not often found in traditional fields of study. The Library of Congress Classification schema, which is the basis of most standard collection assessment tools currently used in the United States, fragments the literature of Women's Studies among the traditional fields of study, making it difficult to assess the quality of library collections in that field. A suggested strategy for overcoming the problem is for librarians to create their own bibliographies to use for assessing their collections. One particularly fruitful avenue is the Internet, which permits searching many remote catalogs for bibliographic information. In order to build and assess Women's Studies collections more effectively, the field should be perceived as “Women Across the Curriculum” instead of in the mode of a traditional discipline.