Agreement with Reveal Media

As you may know printed materials—books, magazines, journals, et cetera—are quickly being digitized by a variety of institutions including libraries and Google. To date, back issues of Sinister Wisdom have not been available electronically to scholars, researchers, and students. While we recognize that there are many issues with digitization, we also don't want Sinister Wisdom and its thirty-five years of lesbian imagination to be lost to future readers. As a result, Sinister Wisdom has entered into an agreement with Reveal Media to digitize back issues from 1976 through 2001.

This was not an easy decision. Reveal Media is not a woman-owned or lesbian-owned company and is in fact a for profit entity. Nevertheless, Reveal Media has an exciting project to digitize issues of magazines and journals from the Women’s Liberation Movement to make them available to research libraries and scholars. We feel that Sinister Wisdom is an important part of the collection and we are pleased to join a number of other feminist and lesbian publications that are a part of the project.

What most excites us about the project is that, as a part of the agreement, Sinister Wisdom will receive an electronic file of all issues of Sinister Wisdom digitized under the agreement. We plan to put these back issues online at our own website, (www.SinisterWisdom.org), to make them widely available to readers. This will probably take a number of years (though secretly we are hoping that it might happen in time for our 40th anniversary in 2016.) In the interim, Reveal Media will sell subscriptions to libraries and other institutions of the full collection. When they reach a particular threshold, they will also make the collection freely available.

An important part ofSinister Wisdom’s contract with Reveal Media is that individual authors can opt out of having their work available in the collection. If you wrote for Sinister Wisdom during these years and you do not want your contribution to be available in the archive, please email Julie R. Enszer at JulieREnszer@gmail.com or write to her at Sinister Wisdom, 2333 McIntosh Road, Dover, FL 33527. In your letter please indicate that you are writing to “opt out” of the digitization project and clearly list the articles you wrote and your name. Your material will be suppressed from the digitization project. Your timely response to this is greatly appreciated.

In the meantime, we will keep you up to date on the project and let you know how it develops.