The website offers no vita on the author, Danuta Bois. She, however, has a page on her site explaining why she created this site. On that page, in a P.S., she states that she is often asked for her credentials. Though the site is devoted to biographies of women who have contributed to society, she states she has no formal education in the area of women’s studies, only the experience of putting this site together. She further offers that her formal education is a master’s degree in cell biology, with involvement in doing research on DNA. She lists her e-mail address and invites people to e-mail her with sites that contain women’s biographies.
I went to google.com to find more information on the author and was able to find that Danuta Hornig Bois was born in 1952 in Poland. Her family immigrated in 1965 to New York, which is her home today. In 1976, she graduated with a bachelor degree in chemistry from the City College of New York. She obtained her master’s degree from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx in cell biology in 1982. One source lists Ms. Bois as stating that her site, established in 1995, grew, first, out of a desire to learn how to create a website and, second, (needing an idea for her website), a personal desire to learn more about contributing women in history, as she feels this has been lacking in formal history lessons learned in school.
Ms. Bois is the publisher of her site, created by her. It is a commercial site. In one interview that I found with her on google.com, she talks about how to obtain free web space to create one’s own web page(s). In this case, the site is as reliable as the author or the intentions of the author.
Ms. Bois does, however, state her intentions up front. She states that she started out with links to women’s biographies already posted on the web. She further states that some of the biographies were written by her. She willingly invites links to other women’s biographies sites. In her page on why she created the website, she states it was out of her own desire to collect (and disseminate) information on contributions by women, as she felt this lacking in her formal education. Though she provides links to books and sites that sell books, I perceive this to be a service, not a sales promotion.
The author provides a list of about 125 links. I checked out several of these links to find that Bois has put together quite a wide variety of information. I was able to find sites from many domains, including .org, .gov, .edu, as well as .com. Not only are different domains offered, sites about women from outside of the United States are also found, of which Great Britain, Australia, Canada, and Germany (in German) are examples. Other diverse links include sites of Muslim women, Spanish women writers (in Spanish), and South Asian women in varied fields.
Not all of the links worked. About one-fifth of those I tried gave me page not found. Though they probably worked at the time they were added, without someone like me e-mailing the author to let her know there is a linking problem, she probably does not go back periodically to check her links. I was, however, able to truncate the URL for most of those pages and get to the home site of that link. Incidentally, I was pleased to spot, at least, two other sites from my Weblist on this site’s list of links. Of the sites I looked at, they all added new information to the Distinguished Women site.
I used the “links to” feature on Google and came up with 2,210 links. I scanned several pages of these links to see the variety of sites providing a link to Distinguished Women. I found all kinds of women’s and women’s studies sites. Many university libraries are listed as linking to this site. Other sites include Kentucky State Department for Libraries and Archives, ORNL (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) Research Library (biographies), and Nova Scotia Provincial Library, to name a few of the varied types of sites linking to Distinguished Women. There are a few that are links by individual people from their website, but the majority of pages seem to be a large, diverse, and legitimate list of sites.
Of the articles that Ms. Bois has written, she has provided references at the end of each article. I found it interesting that all of these references (at least of those that I previewed) were books. Any online references that she has found, she lists under the biographee’s name as another profile (article), thus giving you another link to go to for more information. The links were varied from .com to .edu to .org. The information that she presents is consistent with other information sources that I checked online, specifically from Encyclopedia Britannica. The majority of her articles, not authored by her, come largely from Britannica.com, Microsoft Encarta Encyclopedia.com, or xrefer.com (a reference service for libraries). And again, with these articles, any additional online links that Bois has located on the biographee are listed as another profile.
I was not able to find anywhere on the site when it was last updated. When I checked the “page info” option under the view menu in Netscape, the general information listed “modified February 8, 2002.” I did find a fascinating tracking system to record the number of hits to the site. The tracking system by eXTReMe Tracking listed about every summary one could imagine, including number of hits today, average hits a day, highest month of hits so far, geographic breakdown of hits, and on and on.
This being a site for women’s biographies, the information is not going to change, except in the case of living subjects who are continuing to build their biographies. But even then, only occasional updating would be sufficient.
I believe this site to be a true reflection of what it claims to be; that is, a reference site to find biographical information about all kinds of women. The facts of the author’s articles check out with traditional sources. A variety of reliable links are offered for more information. Even search engines are offered on Bois’ site for further research. I found only one incorrect spelling on her entire site, on her links page.
I find no evidence of bias. The information is presented in a factual format. Even the biographies of the “radical women” that worked toward women’s suffrage were objectively portrayed.
As stated earlier, Bois lists references at the end of her articles. Some of those references are The Book of Women’s Firsts, American Women’s History (a general reference book), and Lost Heroines, to name some. Bois appears to have done this research out of her own genuine interest to learn more about women in history. She, in turn, allows the visitor of her site to continue through her collection of references, links, booklists, and search engines that she has brought together on her site. And, as stated earlier, Bois invites e-mails of information that may be added to this site.
I decided to e-mail the author of one of the other women’s history sites listed on my Weblist. Kathleen McFadden authors a site called Women’s Stories found at http://writetools.com/women. I e-mailed her about a week ago and asked her what about the Distinguished Women site led her to list it as one of the sites one can link to from Women’s Stories. I am disappointed that I do not yet have an answer.
I asked two of my colleagues, one an English research teacher and one a social studies teacher to take a look at the site to see if they felt the information to be reliable and valid. Both agreed the site to be consistent with information found in other sources.
And, finally, I looked at the site awards and reviews page that Bois has on her site. Sixteen icons are shown. I tried all sixteen. Twelve of those links materialized into nothing. I ran into page not found, and sites that had no seeming connection to women’s history, reviews, or awards. Of the four remaining icons which did recognize or review this site, two were sites for educators, whose information rendered credibility to Distinguished Women. One such site, http://www.education-world.com/awards gave this site a B+ rating (with comments) in 1996, shortly after the site originated. The other site, www.awesomelibrary.org, associated with Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory (NWREL), said of this site, “Provides one of the most comprehensive sets of biographies of women available on the net.”