LandWise: A Women & Land Library

Abstract

This paper is about Landesa’s LandWise digital library project. Landesa is an international non profit organization that works on poverty alleviation through the issue of land rights. The Landesa Center for Women’s Land Rights (LCWLR) is a group of lawyers who focuses their work specifically on women’s land rights. Through the years of work championing women’s land rights, they have discovered time and again that one of their largest challenges is finding access to the laws and materials that they need before they can understand the legal framework of a country that they are working in.

LandWise was created to provide development practitioners, policymakers, attorneys, social scientists, and scholars with legal information and materials pertaining to women’s land rights. This paper discusses the information gap that LandWise is intended to fill, the content and services we are able to make available through LandWise, and the role of librarians in creating a digital library specifically geared toward social change.