Gender and Women's Studies (GWS) Portal : Finding Books

The Library Catalog lists books held by UW-Madison libraries, as well as periodicals, videos, archival materials, digital objects, and more. Use the basic search, or go to Advanced if you want to search within specific fields. For example, to find whole books on women in particular a country, in the Library Catalog, go to Advanced and in the subject box, type women [country name]. Ex: women Argentina.

WorldCat is a combined catalog of thousands of libraries. Use when you want to borrow a book, video, or dissertation not available on campus or in another UW campus library. Items arrive within 1-3 weeks. Find the book in Worldcat and click on "Get Through Interlibrary Loan." Track your WorldCat request through your Interlibrary Loan account. When the book is available, the title will appear in the "Items Available" section of My MadCat Account, and you will be notified via email. Worldcat may also be searched by subject, keyword, etc.

A good way to get started on a topic is to look through Reference Books (encyclopedias, dictionaries, bibliographies, handbooks, etc.) The Office of the Gender & Women's Studies Librarian has a collection of such books, some of which are also found in Reference Collections elsewhere on campus or online. Visit the Office in room 430 of Memorial Library, M-F, 8-5. 

Online women-focused reference works include:

• Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories
• Gender Issues and Sexuality: Essential Primary Sources
• Oxford Encyclopedia of Women in World History
• Multimedia Encyclopedia of Women in Today's World

Ph.D. dissertations are an excellent source for reviews of the literature on the topic of the dissertation. If you are looking for a topic for your own dissertation, it is also critical to know what else has been done already. The Libraries' Dissertation and Theses webpage goes over how to find and obtain them. The main database is ProQuest's Dissertation & Theses. UW-Madison Libraries have purchased access to the full-text of dissertations from around the world in the database from 1997 to the present. (Authors sometimes do not allow full-text display for a period of time.  If the full-text is not available and you want to borrow it from the library at the institution where it was written, copy the title and find it in WorldCat.)

UW-Madison dissertations are also cataloged in the Library Catalog.