Author: Jennifer Huang

University of Massachusetts Amherst librarian Ann Kardos has organized an incredible embroidery project to highlight the work of metadata librarians. Check it out!

Unseen Labor is an international library community-organizing embroidery project created by University of Massachusetts Amherst librarian Ann Kardos. Metadata work is not typically seen as creative work, but work that is guided by national standards, best practices, policies and guidelines in order to produce and maintain standard records for library resources that can be shared between institutions and vendors. Metadata librarians and catalogers create and maintain millions of library resources for our patrons, with whom we may rarely (if ever) interact, and we provide valuable backend support for our front-facing colleagues.

“Our Russian Blue, Dewey, contemplates cataloging.”

Stacy Gordon is a technical services supervisor at the Anchorage Public Library in Anchorage, Alaska. Her piece shows a blue-gray cat with green eyes. The cat is standing on a log next to the letter “a” stitched in red. Read together, the cat plus the letter “a” and the log create the title of the piece, Cat-a-log!

Unseen Labor

If you’re looking for fun and creative activities to share with students, zine are a great place to start. Designer, artist, and art teacher, Ray Yang gives some wonderful suggestions on how to engage students in zine-making workshops. Zines are an excellent way to develop narrative and story-telling skills, while also serving as an outlet for creative self-expression.

Check out Yang’s article for more helpful tips.

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.

To support and learn more details about this effort, please consider writing a letter of and sending it off before February 16.

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.

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.

Order your copy of Manifesto.