Women's Information Services and Networks: A Global Source Book

THIS PUBLICATION IS an inventory of women's information, firmly rooted in the needs of the future as defined in the Beijing Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995. This Global Source Book is part of a project called Mapping the World, which also includes a website and a database. Together, these are a detailed guide to specific information pertaining to the position of women and girls worldwide.

The book has three main sections, the first of which introduces the topic. Chapter 1 considers the relationship between information centres and networks, particularly those that have emerged as part of the women’s movement. The varied nature of networks and the advantages of networking are reviewed, together with the process of networking at international, regional and national level, and the relevance of information and communication technologies. These discussions are pertinent to all information centres and networks but are intended to be especially relevant to the resource-poor areas of the South and East.

The following three chapters discuss recent developments within women’s information centres and networks from the perspective of regional specialists, and demonstrate the diversity among regions in the state of women’s information centres and networks, as well as the common factors. Chapter 2 celebrates the diversity, power and strength of African women’s networks. Arguing that networking is a subjective process influenced by location, identity and access, the author shows how African women’s networks have grown, both in the continent and in the diaspora of women living in the North, and how local and regional networks have increasingly strong collaborative links with the international women’s movement.

Chapter 3 considers networks in Asia and the Pacific, where individual women, groups, organizations, communities and nations are already interconnected through a rich and extensive web of networks woven over many years of women's struggles. Here, the task is to learn to wield information and communication technologies (ICTs) to extend these networks and open up new spaces that contribute to emancipation from patriarchal and other societal oppression. It is argued that the focus of networking support in this region should be in skills and training and language learning.

The fourth and final chapter considers the state of women’s groups and networking in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as the newly independent states which were previously part of the USSR. The relative "infancy” of women's organizations in this region which relate to networking and self-organization is acknowledged, as is the diversity of their growth. At the national level, most women’s groups have come together in informal networks, with organization centred around particular issues such as reproductive rights and unemployment in Poland, and violence against women and women in war conflicts in the countries of former Yugoslavia. The use of ICTs is growing more towards an East-West cooperation.

The second section of the book contains a directory of information on a wide variety of women’s information services, including details of the collection or documentation they provide, as well as addresses and the names of contact persons. These services are divided into geographical areas. For easy reference there are two indices: an alphabetical index of names of organizations and a geographical index by country. The bibliography contains some 75 references to a selection of books, journal articles, book chapters, conference papers and electronic articles dealing with women’s information, networks and ICTs, followed by a list of World Wide Web resources.