Kruse wins ACRL award
College Library Director Carrie Kruse won a 2006 Association of College and Research Libraries Women's Studies Section Award for Significant Achievement in Women's Studies Librarianship. The award, sponsored by academic book publisher Routledge, honors a significant or one-time contribution to women's studies librarianship.
Kruse worked with Cynthia Johnson, director of Reader Services at the Pratt Institute Libraries, to create the Women's Studies: Core Books database (http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/ACRLWSS/), which contains recommended in-print titles on many subjects within Women's Studies. The database is hosted by the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center. Kruse and Johnson coordinated the efforts of more than 40 librarians who volunteer to maintain the subjects covered in the database. More information about the award can be found on the ALA news site.
The University of Wisconsin has a long history of supporting the project, which began as a collected list of bibliographies called Core Lists in Women's Studies. The first electronic distribution of the Core Lists was hosted on the university's Women's Studies Librarian's Office gopher server, followed by Web site hosting until 2003.
In 2004, the Core Lists were converted into a database hosted by the UWDCC and were renamed Women's Studies Core Books. Former Digital Content Group staff members Amy Rudersdorf and Tom Durkin helped establish the database format and develop a method for remote updates by the librarians who contribute to the project from across the country. UWDCC staff member Jessica Williams managed the most recent update.
A recent development is the addition of the 1997-2003 versions of the Core Lists to the University of Wisconsin institutional repository, Minds@UW. The 2004 and 2005 versions of the database will also be deposited by Minds@UW this year.