Full text of DOI:10.1177/13505068020090040801

Report
KVIN FO – The Danish
Centre for Information on
Women and Gender
KVINFO is the Danish Centre for Information on Women and Gender. The centre’s
primary objective is to promote the results of women and gender research to the
general public, nationally and internationally. This we do through a wide range of
services and activities, i.e. KVINFO’s library, our website, the web magazine Forum
for Gender & Culture, the expert database Women OnLine, conferences and cultural
events, and through cooperation with other Nordic women’s libraries and infor-
mation centres.
KVINFO’S LIBRARY
The heart of the centre’s activities is the research library. Our library is open to the
public for four days a week, eight hours a day. The library’s core users are
university students, but an increasing number of young people from other levels
of the educational system, such as secondary schools, grammar schools and voca-
tional education also use the library. A small but very important part of our users
are researchers in women’s and gender studies. Professionals working with gender
equality, civil servants, journalists and politicians are also important user groups.
An increasing number of requests and questions are received by email. As part of
our service, we are also happy to answer any factual or statistical questions from
other countries on gender issues (the email address: kvinfo@kvinfo.dk).
Our collection consists of approximately 15,000 titles: 11,500 books and 3500
reports, brochures, unpublished papers and dissertations. The library subscribes
to 350 women’s magazines, women’s studies and gender studies journals, and
several newsletters. The entire collection is on open shelves and users of the library
are welcome to find books themselves just as they can use the Internet and our
databases free of charge. Most of our collection can be borrowed for use outside
the library. In addition to this we take part in the Danish inter-library loan system
that makes it possible for other libraries in the country to borrow publications
directly from us (our library database can be found at KVINFO’s homepage:
www.kvinfo.dk).
The European Journal of Women’s Studies Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications
(London, Thousand Oaks and New Delhi), Vol. 9(4): 485–489
[1350-5068(200211)9:4;485–489;028653]
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The European Journal of Women’s Studies 9(4)
The library collects and registers all Danish publications on women’s studies,
gender studies, men’s studies, queer studies, gender equality, central and valid
statistics, biographies and autobiographies of Danish women, exhibition cata-
logues of Danish women artists, etc. When it comes to other Scandinavian
countries, such as Sweden and Norway, we aim at collecting nearly at the same
high level as for the Danish material. This decision is based on the fact that welfare
state models and the ways to work for gender equality are very similar in all the
Scandinavian countries. We also collect the most important international research
on women, gender and men’s studies, and the most important publications about
equal opportunities in the member states of the European Union. In fact, no less
than 60 percent of our collection is made up of material in English.
KVINFO has its own classification and subject indexing system invented by
Nynne Koch, our founder, and developed over the years by ourselves. It has been
adapted to the needs of a research library like ours, specializing in women’s and
gender studies. The philosophy behind this unique system is to enrich each post
in the catalogue with key words giving each post as many search-entrances as
possible.
The library also houses the Danish Women’s Photo Archive, a file of 5000 photo-
graphs of Danish women taken between 1880 and 1940. The photographs were
collected in the 1980s and give a good insight into women’s private and public
lives. A small selection of these photos can be viewed at our homepage:
www.kvinfo.dk, at ‘Fotoarkivet’. The archive is classified by the topic, i.e. women
working in the fields, women in the kitchen, women on bikes, women teachers,
female industrial workers, etc. The archive is currently accessible at KVINFO in
the form of catalogue cards with contact copies. The negatives are stored at the
Royal Library and copies can be ordered at production price.
At the library’s website there is, among other things, access to links to other
women’s libraries, research centres, women’s and men’s organizations and other
sites. We have a list of addresses of central organizations, associations and NGOs
working with women’s and gender issues in Denmark, and several lists of
important dates in Danish women’s history. It is also possible to read about the
origin of the International Women’s Day in Danish and German, still celebrated
each year on 8 March in several countries.
OTHER ACTIVITIES
Besides the library, KVINFO offers many other facilities, projects and services.
Every year, we arrange a wide range of lectures, seminars and cultural events. In
recent years, it has been our deliberate strategy to strengthen our services on
KVINFO’s homepage, www.kvinfo.dk, as this undoubtedly has proven to be the
best way of reaching our target group and fulfilling our purpose as a documen-
tation and information centre.
FORUM FOR GENDER & CULTURE
KVINFO’s magazine, Forum, was launched in 1982 and until 1992 it was the only
Danish women’s studies journal. In 1998, KVINFO decided to stop publishing the
paper edition altogether and thus it became the first Danish cultural web
magazine. The purpose of the web magazine is to reach new groups of readers and
to place gender on the agenda. The aim is to increase the visibility of Danish
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women and of gender issues and to create links and contact to other women and
gender researchers globally. The magazine is widely used by Danish journalists
with an interest in gender, culture and ethnicity. It is published in Danish, but some
articles are also available in English for our international readers. Forum also
contains a useful link terminal – a guide to central links and articles on gender and
culture worldwide. Forum for Gender & Culture is available at the address
www.forum.kvinfo.dk, where it is also possible to join the mailing list.
WOMEN ONLINE
In 1995, KVINFO set up a database of women experts in Denmark called Women
Online. The database contains easy-to-access biographical information in Danish
on a large number of women opinion leaders, senior managers, politicians,
researchers and experts within a wide range of subjects. Currently the database
has over 1300 entries. All women in the database have been personally contacted
and have all agreed to publish their profile.
Women Online is designed for the use of journalists, broadcasters and media
workers. It provides a broad selection of candidates for appointments in private
and public office, for committees, tribunals, commissions and councils, and offers
names for speakers, teachers, facilitators and consultants (Women Online is
accessible to users on the Internet and is free of charge at the address
www.ekspert.kvinfo.dk).
WOMEN’S HISTORY SOURCES
One of KVINFO’s latest additions to our website is the web project Women’s
History Sources, or Kvindekilder. The site was launched in November 2001 and
tells the story of Danish women’s road to equal opportunities from 1850 to 1920.
Important landmarks in the history of Danish women, such as the suffrage,
women’s access to education and employment, women’s fight for independence
and the debate on sexual morality is now available in Danish on the Internet. The
website consists of introductory essays, original sources, i.e. historical documents
otherwise not available to the general public, such as newspaper articles, extracts
from debates from the Danish parliament, extracts from laws and bills, memoirs
and letters, as well as biographies on key figures and women pioneers and a
timeline indicating important events.
The website is aimed specifically at older pupils at secondary school and their
teachers, but gives the general public a unique opportunity to explore the history
of women in Denmark in a completely new way. It has been an overwhelming
success and over the next few years, other subjects and periods will be added to
this site. By the end of this year, the story of the feminist Redstocking movement
of the 1970s will be launched on the site (the site can be found on KVINFO’s
homepage and at the address: www.kvindekilder.dk).
THE BIOGRAPHICAL ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF DANISH WOMEN
Another important web project to be launched by 2003, is The Biographical Encyclo-
paedia of Danish Women, or Dansk kvindebiografisk leksikon. The encyclopaedia was
published in three volumes in 2000 and contains approximately 2000 Danish
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women, all pioneers within their field, i.e. within education, nursing, science,
music, etc., or central figures within the suffrage movement, politics, women’s
organizations, research, business, the arts and so forth. The initiative was taken by
women historians within women’s studies in Denmark more than 10 years ago,
headed by Jytte Larsen, editor, women’s historian and former head of the library
at KVINFO.
In December last year, KVINFO required the rights from the publisher to digi-
talize the biographies. It will be of great importance to ensure that the biographies
of important Danish women become available to the general public free of charge
on the Internet.
COOPERATION WITH DANISH CENTRES FOR WOMEN’S AND GENDER
STUDIES
Being a self-governing institution, KVINFO is not formally connected to any of the
centres for women’s and gender studies at the Danish universities. However,
KVINFO has close contact to the centres and cooperates with researchers on a
regular basis. As a service to the students and researchers in women’s and gender
studies and to others working professionally with gender issues, the library
publishes a Danish newsletter four times a year which, among other things,
includes a copy of the table of contents from the most important research journals
within the field. Researchers and others then have the opportunity to order copies
of the articles free of charge.
KVINFO has a close connection to the Coordination for Gender Research in
Denmark and also the Association of Gender Research in Denmark. We are
represented in the executive committee of the association and take an active part
in its annual conference for researchers and students by, for instance, organizing
workshops. In 2001, KVINFO arranged and hosted the annual conference in
Copenhagen, which was attended by 150 students and researchers primarily from
Denmark and Sweden.
COOPERATION WITH WOMEN’S LIBRARIES IN THE NORDIC COUNTRIES
The Internet offers new possibilities for cooperation and exchange between
libraries. In 1996 KVINFO, together with NIKK, the Nordic Institute for Women’s
Studies and Gender Research, took the initiative to a renewed cooperation
between libraries in the field of women’s studies and gender research in the Nordic
countries, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Iceland and Denmark.
In 1997, representatives from women’s libraries in all the Nordic countries met
in order to discuss the possibilities for a Nordic Virtual Library for Women’s
Studies and Gender Research. The idea was to make women’s studies and gender
research in the Nordic countries more visible both in the Nordic countries and
internationally by making the best resources in the Nordic countries available from
a joint website. The Nordic Virtual Library for Women’s Studies and Gender
Research is a website offering descriptions of each link and thereby offering a
better service. In the future, we hope to build a joint search interface for some of
the most important databases. The virtual library is accessible from NIKK’s and
KVINFO’s homepages and is available both in English and in the Scandinavian
languages: www.nikk.uio.no or www.nikk.uio.no/ qbiblioteket/ index.html
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THE HISTORY OF KVINFO
KVINFO is the only women’s library in Denmark and, contrary to what many
people think, it did not grow out of the feminist movement of the 1970s. Its history
goes back to 1964, when Danish women’s rights organizations succeeded in their
efforts to establish a women’s archive at the State Library in Aarhus. This inspired
KVINFO’s founder Nynne Koch, who at the time worked at the Royal Library in
Copenhagen as a secretary, to initiate a women’s documentation service. She was
allocated 15 minutes a day in which to register incoming books on women’s issues
in a card catalogue. KVINFO, in other words, has its roots in the Danish library
sector, but grew out of and has always been committed to women’s and gender
issues.
By 1982, KVINFO was established as a four-year experiment funded by the
Danish Ministry of Culture. Nynne Koch and her staff of volunteers moved out of
the Royal Library to a new venue in order to reach a broader audience and to
expand the activities. Five years later, KVINFO became a self-governing institution
financed by the Ministry of Culture. In 1997, KVINFO moved into a newly built
venue next to the Royal Library. Besides more space, better facilities and a beautiful
view over the harbour, we were also able to provide our library users with a
modern reading room with open shelves and free access to PCs. Today, KVINFO
is run as a professional institution widely acknowledged for our work.
LIST OF LINKS MENTIONED IN THE ARTICLE
KVINFO: www.kvinfo.dk
Forum for Gender & Culture: www.forum.kvinfo.dk
Women’s History Sources: www.kvindekilder.dk
Women Online: www.ekspert.kvinfo.dk
The Nordic Virtual Library for Women’s Studies and Gender Research:
www.nikk.uio.no/ qbiblioteket/ index.html
Line Holst holds an MA in women’s studies and is a research librarian at KVINFO.
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