Longwood University Library

The Greenwood Library has free access to three full-text collections of primary sources related to women’s studies from Alexander Street Press during the month of March. These may be accessed from on-campus locations through March 31:

• British and Irish Women’s Letters and Diaries contain the personal writings, many of them previously unpublished, of women from England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales from 1500 through the 1950s, including recently acquired items from the Imperial War Museum in London.
• North American Women’s Letters and Diaries draws from more than 1,000 sources to document the views of women in the U.S. and Canada on personal experiences and historical events from colonial times to the 1950s.
• Women and Social Movements in the U.S. examines perspectives on women’s social activism from colonial times to the present by combining primary documents and images with scholarly essays.

Other resources available on the Women’s Studies Databases page include three full-text databases: Contemporary Women’s Issues, Women Working 1870-1930, and the Women’s Studies Encyclopedia.

The Greenwood Library has free access to three full-text collections of fiction and non-fiction writings by African Americans from Alexander Street Press during the month of February. These may be accessed from on-campus locations through February 28:

• Black Drama contains approximately 1200 plays by 201 playwrights as well as selected playbills, production photographs and other ephemera related to the plays.
• Black Thought and Culture contains letters, speeches, essays, political leaflets, trial transcripts, and interviews of important African Americans, including 2,500 pages of exclusive Black Panther oral histories.
• Black Women Writers contains fiction, nonfiction and poetry by women from North America, Africa and the Caribbean plus genre studies and essays about the history of the feminist movement in these regions.

The Library also has continuing access to the Schomburg Studies on the Black Experience, which chronicles the African experience in the Americas through scholarly essays, research, primary sources, timelines, video clips and images on multidisciplinary topics such as black women’s studies, religion, black cinema, the black press, African-American labor history, slavery, and sexuality.

The Greenwood Library has purchased perpetual access to Thomson Gale’s Shakespeare Collection online database. The Shakespeare Collection brings together general reference data, full-text scholarly periodicals, reprinted criticism, primary source material such as the Prompt Books and the Gordon Crosse Theatrical Diary, and the full-text annotated works from The Arden Shakespeare. Dr. Shawn Smith, Assistant Professor of English, was impressed by the photographs and paintings relevant to Shakespearean studies as well as by the wealth of primary and critical material. Comments from his students during a trial of the database last spring include:

• I found the images section helpful because I do enjoy seeing the way people stage things.
• One of my favorite things about the site was the section called historical texts in which you can view pictures of older texts.
• Having the plays, sonnets, etc. online in full text was GREAT.
• I really like the way the footnotes are set up in a separate little window. This is immensely helpful as you can read and have the notes right next to the text.

The Shakespeare Collection will be useful not only to English majors but also to the theatre department and any classes studying sixteenth- and seventeenth-century history and religion.