Digital Collections Guide

GenderWatch is a full text database of unique and diverse publications that focus on how gender impacts a broad spectrum of subject areas. With its archival material, dating back to 1970 in some cases, GenderWatch is a repository of important historical perspectives on the evolution of the women's movement, men's studies, the transgendered community, and the changes in gender roles over the years. Publications include scholarly journals, magazines, newspapers, newsletters, regional publications, books, and NGO, government and special reports.

A four-year project to digitize over one million pages from the magazines, journals, newsletters, and newspapers of the alternative press archives of participating libraries spanning the 1960's to the 1980's. Starting with collections by feminists and the GI press, the collection will grow to include small literary magazines, underground newspapers, LGBT periodicals, the minority press (Latino, Black and Native American) and the extreme right-wing press

Provides page images of back issues of the core scholarly journals in the humanities, social sciences, and basic sciences from the earliest issues to within a few years of current publication. Users may browse by journal title or discipline, or may search the full-text or citations/abstracts. New issues of existing titles and new titles are added approximately on a weekly basis. The University of Illinois has access to the following JSTOR collections: Arts & Sciences I-XV, 19th Century British Pamphlets, Business IV, Global Plants, Hebrew Journals, Ireland, Life Sciences Collection, Lives of Literature, Security Studies, Struggles for Freedom - South Africa, Sustainability, and World Heritage Sites - Africa.

This database contains the archives of 26 of the most influential periodical publications covering LGBT interests from 1954-2015. It includes publications from both the US and UK. This resource also caters to interests in many related fields, such as 20th-century history, sociology, health studies, political science, and psychology.

Periodicals Archive Online is a major archive that makes the backfiles of scholarly periodicals in the arts, humanities and social sciences available electronically, providing access to the searchable full text of hundreds of titles. The database spans more than two centuries of content, 37 key subject areas, and multiple languages.

An archival research resource comprising the backfiles of leading women's interest consumer magazines. Issues are scanned in high-resolution color and feature detailed article-level indexing. Coverage ranges from the late-19th century through to 2005 and these key primary sources permit the examination of the events, trends, and attitudes of this period. Among the research fields served by this material are gender studies, social history, economics/marketing, media, fashion, politics, and popular culture.

This collection includes approximately 100,000 pages of published letters and diaries from women from England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales writing from 1500 to 1950. This searchable and browsable database is drawn from 290 sources, including journal articles, pamphlets, newsletters, monographs, and conference proceedings

Defining Gender has brought together over 120,000 pages of original documents relating to Gender Studies. The images are sourced from British and European libraries and archives, including a strong core of document images from the Bodleian Library, Oxford and the British Library.

A unique collection of ephemera (brochures, clothing items, booklets, flyers, etc.) documenting LGBTQ movements in several Eastern European countries and offering important insights into LGBTQ activism in Eastern Europe and the Balkans in the past decade.

Essential primary sources documenting the changing representations and lived experiences of gender roles and relations from the nineteenth century to the present. This collection offers sources for the study of women's suffrage, the feminist movement, the men’s movement, employment, education, the body, the family, and government and politics.

Collection of more than 4,700 digitised publications from continental Europe, the U.S., UK, Canada, and New Zealand, dating from 1543-1945. Allows scholars to trace the evolution of feminism within a single country, as well as the impact of one country's movement on those of the others. Consists of: the periodical series and the monograph language series.

LGBT Studies is an online resource hosting books, periodicals, and archival materials documenting LGBT political, social and cultural movements throughout the twentieth century and into the present day. The collection includes documents ranging from letters, speeches, interviews, and ephemera covering the political evolution of gay rights as well as memoirs, biographies, poetry, letters and works of fiction that illuminate the lives of lesbians, gays, transgendered, and bisexual individuals and the community. It features select rare works from notable LGBT publishers including Alyson Books and Cleis Press, as well as mainstream trade and university publishers. It is also seeking to represent the major winners of both the Stonewall Book Awards and Lambda Literary Awards, many of which are no longer in print.

LGBT Studies in Video is a cinematic survey of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people as well as the cultural and political evolution of the LGBT community. It features award-winning documentaries, interviews, archival footage, and select feature films exploring LGBT history, gay culture and subcultures, civil rights, marriage equality, LGBT families, AIDS, transgender issues, religious perspectives on homosexuality, global comparative experiences, and other topics. A primary partner for this collection is Frameline, a nonprofit media organization that produces the San Francisco International LGBT Film Festival, the oldest film festival devoted to lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender programming currently in existence.

Medieval Family Life contains full-color images of the original medieval manuscripts that comprise the Paston, Cely, Plumpton, Stonor, and Armburgh family letter collections, along with full-text searchable transcripts from printed editions. Also includes family trees, chronology, a map, and a glossary.

North American Women's Letters and Diaries (NAWLD) is a full-text database of the personal experiences as reflected in the letters and diaries of 1,325 women who lived in North America before 1960.

Includes complete facsimile images of over 230 manuscripts written or compiled by women living in the British Isles during the 16th and 17th centuries. Document formats include, but are not limited to: account books, advice, commonplace books, culinary writing, meditations, travel writing, and verse.

This collection contains documentation on the growth, transformation, successes and failures of one of the important American social movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the women's rights movement. The correspondence, minutes, legal papers, and financial records from three important women's rights organizations are documented in substantial detail in this module: the National Woman's Party, the League of Women Voters, and the Women's Action Alliance.

This resource seeks to broaden the field of queer history by prioritizing projects that focus on the experiences and perspectives of under-represented historical groups, including people of color, trans people, and people with disabilities. We also hope to develop work that focuses on less-studied topics such as sexual governance, state violence, and carceral politics. We use the word “queer” in its broadest and most inclusive sense. We intend for the website to embrace topics that are gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender and to include work on sexual and gender formations that are queer but not necessarily LGBT.

We are also especially interested in archives themselves and the ways in which they are constructed, constrained, and contested. In naming the project, we intend to invoke the idea that the past itself is queer—simultaneously comprehensible and inscrutable.

This module contains both printed and manuscript primary sources covering four centuries, focused on the changing roles of women in society. This includes papers and printed works of important female writers and thinkers, as well as life writing and autobiographies of ordinary women.

This database provides access to primary source material from prominent sex researchers, sexologists, and other specialists from diverse fields.

Women's travel diaries and correspondence from the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. Includes manuscripts, diaries, travel journals, correspondence, photographs, postcards and ephemera, from 1818 to the 1970s. The geographical area covered by these diaries is far-reaching, with travel to countries within the British, French, Chinese and American empires and discussion of empire and nationalism, as well as description of the post-colonial world. A great variety of modes of transport are covered, including sea voyages, road trips, wagon trains and air travel.

This database examines efforts to foster gender equity through expanded economic and social participation of women on a global scale. Covering a century, the database highlights and evaluates activism through individual efforts, organizational initiatives, and socio-cultural projects led by or for women in the Global South.

Women and Social Movements, International is a landmark collection of primary materials. Through the writings of women activists, their personal letters and diaries, and the proceedings of conferences at which pivotal decisions were made, this collection lets you see how women’s social movements shaped much of the events and attitudes that have defined modern life.

The Scholar's Edition includes all features of the Basic Edition that have been published since March 2004. It currently includes 102 document projects and archives with more than 4,050 documents, and 145,000 pages of additional full-text documents, written by some 2,200 primary authors. It includes book, film and website reviews, notes from the archives, and teaching tools. Those subscribing to the Scholar's Edition can access the online version of Notable American Women or the database on Commissions on the Status of Women.

This resource is comprised of two distinct elements: A finding aid to women's studies resources in the National Archives, Kew; and, Original documents on the suffrage question in Britain, the Empire and colonial territoriesThe finding aid brings together the results of a five year project by staff at Kew and enables researchers to quickly locate details of any document relating to women in the National Archives at Kew. It is far more detailed and extensive than anything available elsewhere on the web and has the benefit of ranging across all of the classes of material held at the National Archives. The original documents focus on the campaign for women's suffrage in Britain, 1903-1928, and the granting of women's suffrage in colonial territories, 1930-1962. Prominent suffragettes include Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, the Pankhursts, Emily Wilding Davison, Clara Giveen and Rachel Peace (alias Jane Short).

Women Writers Project, a research project that is devoted to early modern writing by women and electronic text encoding. Offers access to a searchable catalogue, bibliographic information, the history of the project, documentation, an archive of the newsletter, and suggested readings.

Women’s Voices and Life Writing, 1600-1968 brings together diaries and oral histories for the study of the lives and experiences of less well-known women, told through their own words. Featuring content from both regional and national archives across the UK and Ireland, users can explore the life course of hundreds of individuals from a diverse range of backgrounds.