Librarians and friends of Jude Vachon have written to the leadership of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh to rename their zine collection after her. Jude Vachon started this collection in 2008 and maintained it through 2015. She exemplified the commitment to community-centered programs that CLP strives towards. Honoring Jude through this named collection would be a way to carry forward her work and strengthen ties with communities in Pittsburgh.
We are so excited to introduce a new member to our ZineCat team. Meet our Metadata Intern,Vita Kurland! They will be helping us to provide support in strategizing the harmonization of zine metadata, writing guidance for current and future contributors to ZineCat, and collaborating on a zine that documents the work.
Bio:
Vita Kurland (they/them) is an archivist, curator, and dress historian. They are completing their MA in Costume Studies at NYU Steinhardt and MLIS at LIU Palmer while working as a Graduate Fellow at Barnard College in the Archives and Special Collections. Kurland’s research focuses on graphic T-shirts, secondhand markets, collecting, and memorial wearables. As an archivist their work is centered around bringing marginalized histories to the forefront of archives and education. They hold their BA in Art and Aesthetics from Bard College Berlin.
ZineCat envisions becoming a completely collaborative platform for cataloging and discovering zines, where libraries or individuals can share their holdings. In the future, ZineCat will have an approachable interface where librarians can upload and ingest the metadata from their own zine collections.
In order to establish a standard metadata schema for zines, a group of ZineCat contributors has created xZINECOREx. If this metadata standard for zines is adopted widely by zine collections, it will facilitate the easier sharing and discoverability of zine information through the ZineCat.
Take a look at the helpful visual schema map of ZineCat that Milo Miller of the Queer Zine Archive Project has made.
Zine Union Catalog visual schema map, Image by Milo Miller, co-founder of QZAP, from https://github.com/MiloQZAP/xZINECOREx/blob/master/visual_schema_map.pdf
For the release of Bernardine Evaristo’s new book, Manifesto, independent publisher, Grove Atlantic, is inviting readers to download and print The Evaristo Manifesto as a zine! Make your own and write down your intentions, motivations and convictions.
Share the making of your zine and manifesto by tagging @groveatlantic on social media!
About Manifesto: On Never Giving Up
Evaristo is the first Black woman and first Black British person to ever win the Booker Prize in its fifty-year history. In her vibrant and astonishing nonfiction debut, Manifesto, Evaristo recounts her life and career as she rebelled against the mainstream and fought for over several decades to bring her creative work into the world. With her characteristic humor, she describes her childhood with a Nigerian father and white Catholic mother, tells the story of how she helped set up Britain’s first Black women’s theatre company, remembers the queer relationships of her twenties, and recounts her determination to write books that were absent in the literary world around her. She reminds us of how far we have come, and how far we still have to go.
Both unconventional memoir and inspirational text, Manifesto is a unique reminder to us all to persist in doing work we believe in, even when we feel overlooked or discounted. Evaristo shows us how we can follow in her footsteps, from first vision to insistent perseverance, to eventual triumph.
Zines in Libraries: Selecting, Purchasing, and Processing has just been published by ALA (American Library Association) with contributions by our very own ZineCat community. The book contains insights from Katrin Abel, Jeremy Brett, Ann (A’misa) Matsushima Chiu, Marta Chudolinska, Jenna Freedman, Joan Jocson-Singh, Mica Johnson, Lauren Kehoe, Joshua Lupkin, Meg Metcalf, and Ziba Perez. Order your copy today!
Many of the authors have also shared their chapters at ZineLibraries.info. The project managers of the Zine Union Catalog have also contributed their knowledge.
Read Jenna Freedman’s “The Barnard Zine Library: The Controlled and the Wild” to learn about the development of the Zine Library at Barnard. It details how this special library and archive came together and includes images of ephemera from the process. Freedman is also sure to give credit to those who have helped her assemble the library along the way and is transparent about what needs improvement or could have been done differently while also sharing future goals for the institution. With humor and grace, this chapter gives a thorough behind-the-scenes view of the Barnard Zine Library.
To learn more about what we do at ZineCat, check out the chapter “The Zine Union Catalog” by Lauren Kehoe. The history and many goals of ZineCat are outlined in this essay. Kehoe expands upon how the catalog works, its beginnings, and its projected impact on the study, research, and dissemination of zines. Acknowledging the inherent tension within cataloging and the work that still needs to be done, the chapter ends with an open call. Please feel free to reach out to us at zinecatproject@gmail.com if you want to get involved, know more about the Zine Union Catalog, or to simply share your thoughts! We deeply appreciate your feedback.
We are starting off the new year with some exciting news. ZineCat is proud to announce the addition of two new collections: Anchor Archive Zine Library and the OCAD U Zine Library. Look out for this new integration soon!
Many thanks to Anchor Archive and OCAD for joining our database!
Please reach out to zinecatproject@gmail.com if you have a zine archive you’d like to share too.
