ICSF Resources
Documentation Centre
ICSF’s Documentation Centre (DC) has a variety of resources relevant to women in the fisheries sector
By Ramya Rajagopalan of ICSF’s Documentation Centre (DC)
The Documentation Centre (DC) of ICSF was set up in 1998 to gather and disseminate pertinent information in fisheries to artisanal fishworkers, fishworker organizations, policy makers, academics and others. Apart from providing information per se, the DC also provides links to other information sources relevant to fisheries, particularly through the ICSF website.
The major themes for documentation include: artisanal fisheries; fisheries management, fishworkers and fishing communities, the role of women in fisheries, fishworker unions and movements, conditions of work, social security; fisheries trade, fishing technology, fish processing techniques and methods, coastal area management, coastal zone issues and fisheries legislation.
The resources available at the centre are classified according to keywords and themes, and these are captured in a database format. The centre has resources in the form of books, documents, journal articles, news clippings and videos. The information we have here is primarily in English. We are trying to develop similar information resources in French, Spanish and Portuguese.
On the theme of women in the fisheries sector, the centre holds, at present about 82 documents. The majority of these focus on women in the fisheries sector in Asia (42). We have fewer documents from Africa (15), South America (3), Europe (5) and Canada (8). Most of these documents are either conference proceedings or papers. Besides this, the centre also has 28 books and15 articles on this theme from various journals.
We receive a few newsletters that carry information on women in the fisheries, including Women in fisheries (Information Bulletin) from the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and Coastal Community News brought out by the Coastal Community Network in Canada. Several other journals and newsletters we receive carry occasional articles on this theme.
Relevant video resources of the centre include:
Our endeavour is to make the resources we have as accessible as possible. The resources available at the centre can be accessed from the ICSF website using the Search documentation button under Resources on the Home Page. This facility provides the users with two options: Quick Search and Documentation Search. The Quick Search option provides a list of keywords that could be used for searching the documents. Some of the keywords that could be useful in a search on women in the fisheries sector include the following: women, processing units, fisheries, fishing communities, gender, small-scale fisheries and fishworkers. You can also search by geographical area, for example Asia, Africa, Europe or Canada. It is possible to use multiple keywords to search documents. The documents can also be searched using the name of the author or the title of the book/ article.
The results of the search provide the title of the document, author, publication details and a short abstract. These documents can be requested by using the option: add to my list. This will be received as an email to the centre. The documents can be photocopied and sent, on request. Besides this, users are also welcome to visit the DC in Chennai to access our resources. We are still in the process of building up our resource base and we would appreciate any help you may be able to give us, in terms of relevant documents, articles, videos, photographs, maps, illustrations, charts, posters, audio tapes, CDs and the like.
