UofT Libraries

SDS students and faculty have full access to the University of Toronto Library (UTL), which has print, microform, and electronic collections unrivalled in Canada. The 15 million holdings rank UTL third among North American university libraries, after Harvard and  Yale. Its inclusion of numerous resources relevant to sexual diversity makes UTL one of the premier SDS research sites in the world.

The online catalogue provides access to a wealth of books and journals in paper. UTL also has excellent on-line resources, including indexes, journal articles, and books, which relate directly to SDS. Of particular note is LGBT Life with Full Text, a database resource described by Library Journal as “a milestone in organizing and enhancing access to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender literatures.” LGBT Life is an international index to subject areas such as civil liberties, culture, employment, family, history, politics, psychology, religion, and sociology. It contains indexing and abstracts for more than 80 GLBT-specific core periodicals, and full-text content mined from many journals, newspapers, and books. Other indexing and abstract tools useful for SDS are accessible here, and include the Alternative Press Index, Gender Studies Database (with strong coverage of women’s studies, men’s studies, and sexual diversity), Scopus, and Web of Knowledge.

The Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, located at 120 St. George Street, has collections with important materials in the history of writing about sexual difference. Two acquisitions of note, obtained from gay activist and writer Ian Young, include more than 1,200 copies of popular gay pulp fiction novels of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as an impressive collection of writings by and about AIDS dissidents. The Fisher Library has also recently received a very large international collection of posters relating to AIDS and HIV.

For information on Canadian scholars working on glbt issues, see Alan Miller’s Sexual Diversity Studies page.