Access to Notable American Women

Journeying together in this fortieth-anniversary year of Notable American Women, our first guidepost is the copyright notice. The dictionary has a valid copyright dated 1971 by the President and Council of Radcliffe College. In 1999, Harvard and Radcliffe officially merged. The copyright holder is now the President and Fellows of Harvard College, based on the copyright notice in the fifth volume, published in 2004. While the three-volume set is now out of print, copyright continues in force until 2067.

I cannot legally reprint entire biographical sketches from Notable American Women, but the doctrine of fair use allows me some right to quote short passages. In the previous post, I linked to each volume's page on Amazon. Purchasing a copy of the three-volume set is one way to follow along with this blog. (In the interest of full disclosure, each time you click an Amazon link in this blog, I receive credit as an Amazon associate. If you purchase a book from Amazon through one of my links, I will receive a commission. The author and publisher will be likewise compensated for their work.)

Over two thousand libraries have a copy of the dictionary on their shelves. Worldcat.org can help you find one near you. Some copies are in the reference collection and will not circulate, but some libraries, including my alma mater, San Jose State University, will loan a copy to cardholders.

San Jose State University likely allows its copy to circulate because every word of the dictionary has been scanned and indexed in the Scholar's Edition of the database Women and Social Movements in the United States, 1600-2000. Libraries subscribe to the database and make it available to members of its community through the Internet, either remotely or on the library's computers. If you have access to an academic library, you may be able to follow along in the dictionary online with each blog post.

Google Books is a project that scans published works and makes them available to read online, either in whole or in part. Copyright law allows anyone to reprint material in the public domain, which gives Google the right to scan and distribute entire books of a certain vintage over the Internet. Google has also scanned images of books still under copyright, and through agreements with the publisher or copyright holder, allows readers to view a certain number of pages for free. (This is the same principle that guides Amazon's Search Inside the Book feature.)

Volumes 1-3 of Notable American Women are available for search either through Amazon or Google Books. You may or may not be able to access a particular biographical sketch, but if that is the only access you have to the dictionary, it is better than nothing.