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The publication rate and volume of bibliographies on women's studies in the past ten years have grown dramatically. As an interdisciplinary field of scholarship, women's studies covers a vast array of subjects. For this reason, most of the bibliographies being published are fairly specialized. That is, they cover specific aspects of women's studies such as history or education. The very excellent Esther Stineman work, Women's Studies: A Recommended Core Bibliography (discussed more fully below), which has a cutoff date of 1978, includes 90 bibliographies itself. This author has easily identified nearly 30 women's studies bibliographies published separately since 1978 and many more soon to be published.

We've been living in a homogenous world, you know a world centered on and seen through the language perceptions of men. The consequences of this for everything that we take for granted, for all our assumptions are very deep. Feminism, in the sense I use it, is a radical complexity thought in the process of transforming itself. It is a kind of breaking open of not only the oversimplification but of the lies and the silence in which so much of human experience has been cloaked. Too much has been left out, too much has been unmentioned, too much has been made taboo. Too many connections have been disguised or denied. (Interview with Adrienne Rich, Christopher Street, Jan. 1977, pp. 9–16.)

The past decade has seen an enormous amount of publication and research focusing on the concerns of women. As feminist scholarship expands, publication about women and women's issues will continue. So much has been produced that it is nearly impossible to keep abreast of it all. And it is equally difficult to adequately evaluate these publications. Because the literature on women now is so vast, a brief list of essential resources of interest to public libraries is needed. Rather than attempt to name many specific titles for a core circulating collection I have concentrated on very basic reference tools. Women's studies journals are not included. See Serials Review 5:4.

According to statistical reports, most of the national electorate is not sufficiently interested in politics to bother voting for candidates for public office. This indifference is not shared by many authors. More than 50 book titles in the 1981–82 Books in Print (New York, Bowker, 1981) have the words “Politics of …” followed by the subject of the book. Some are concerned with the politics of large issues such as war, peace, energy, human rights, justice, oil, technology, the media, Euroeconomics, or international air transportation. Other authors deal with more personal concerns such as the politics of alcoholism, drugs, Medicare, mental health, motherhood, language development, self‐sufficiency, or education. These titles indicate the control exercised by government in many different areas of life. Until a law, statute, ordinance, ruling, or regulation effects an individual, there is relatively little interest or concern with the actions of elected officials, or the agencies implementing these decisions.

The one component of collection development most difficult for librarians is the evaluation of the collection. Various methods can be employed to evaluate the collection including statistical analysis, list checking, user opinions, direct observation, and applying standards. All of these methods have strengths and weaknesses, and numerous opinions exist on the value of each method. However, almost all experts agree that libraries need to invest a great deal of time, staff, and budget for any evaluation to be considered valuable. The process becomes even more complex when evaluating interdisciplinary areas such as women's studies. Collection development issues for women's studies has been well covered in the literature, but very little exists on the evaluation of women's studies collections. This article will discuss one method for collection evaluation, the Research Libraries Group (RLG) Conspectus, and outline the process of using the Conspectus to evaluate the women's studies collection at the Pennsylvania State University Libraries. Given the importance of information needs for diversity materials and the number of librarians who select women's studies materials among their many other responsibilities, this information will be valuable for all librarians engaged in interdisciplinary collection development in both public and academic libraries.

This essay is offered as advice to those who contemplate becoming or have recently become bibliographers. I begin with the admonition that neither users' studies, statistical analyses, nor approval plans compensate for a lack of knowledge of disciplinary research interests and bibliographic structure. In the final analysis, the best bibliographers are scholars. They keep current with a discipline's investigations and monitor its evolution. Even if they are unable to engage in detailed discourse on the more esoteric subjects its practitioners study, they understand its topography. That is, they possess a “feel” for what students in a given field find interesting, they understand its epistemology, know its publication trends and favored formats, and have a fine reference librarian's ability to use its bibliographic apparatus.

School Library Media Annual. 1983‐ . A. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited. Ed. by Shirley L. Aaron and Pat R. Scales. 333p. $35. LC 84–640490. ISSN 0739–7712. OCLC 9809890. School Library Media Annual 1983 is the first volume of a new annual publication from Libraries Unlimited. It was developed to cover important events, issues, concepts, and trends relevant to the field of school librarianship. The specific purposes of School Library Media Annual are:

This is a resource guide for librarians who wish to gather books and other materials to use in promoting National Women's History Week or, as it will be soon, National Women's History Month. The emphasis is on history rather than on current women's issues. Most of the materials cited have appeared within the past ten years, but a few important older works are included as well.

As the field of women's studies has grown into a mature academic discipline, the number of sources devoted to women has increased dramatically, particularly in the last decade. Many of these sources are basic, but fill gaps in the literature and refine search strategy. This article focuses on introductory level materials (listed in the bibliography) appropriate for search strategy use. Titles discussed are useful for topic selection (almanacs, annuals), background information (encyclopedias, dictionaries, handbooks), supplementary information (statistical, biographical, bibliographic sources), and access to the library catalog and periodical literature (indexes, abstracts). Sources were culled mainly from American Reference Books Annual, New Books on Women and Feminism, and the “New Reference Books in Women's Studies” section of Feminist Collections. With a few exceptions, these sources have been published since the mid‐eighties and were not discussed in Susan Searing's Introduction to Library Research in Women's Studies or Women's Studies: A Recommended Core Bibliography, 1980–1985 by Catherine Loeb, et al.