Hope your new year has been off to a great start! We have an exciting announcement to share: the 2023 Zine Librarian unConference (ZLuC) will be held in San Francisco! For those who don’t know about ZLuC –
What: ZLuC is an inspirational, informative, and fun gathering of people who care deeply about zines and their ability to change lives for the better.
Where: the University of San Francisco (and hopefully other venues!)
Who: Everyone is welcome! The primary audience is workers and volunteers from academic, public, and special libraries, as well as community-oriented independent libraries and archives. If you’re interested in zines in libraries and archives, we’re happy to have you join in the fun.
We are excited to announce that ZineCat Project Manager Lauren Kehoe and Anchor Archive Librarian Amanda Stevens will be presenting at the ARLIS/NA Conference on ZineCat and Zine Thesaurus this spring. Read more about their session below.
Image Credit: Art Libraries Society of North America
Community Tools for Radical Collections: Building a Subject Thesaurus and Union Catalog for Zines
Zines are rich research materials, increasingly being collected across libraries. Perhaps because zines exist in counter-cultural spaces, they were first collected and circulated by independent zine libraries. This hybrid environment of zine collections translates to dispersed and varied mechanisms for access and description. Descriptions and metadata, and thus discovery of zines, are strewn across library catalogs, archival finding aids, standalone databases, spreadsheets, print handouts, and proprietary online platforms. This multiplicity poses impediments to finding and using zines in aggregate. Furthermore, zines are radical publications that defy rules, often lacking metadata and not fitting into standardized systems for cataloging and classification.
Members of the zine library community have been working collaboratively to build their own shared tools for improving management of, and access to, zines and zine collections. These tools include ZineCat, a union catalog for zines, and a zine subject thesaurus for alternative description. This presentation will provide an overview of both projects, how they have worked alongside each other and will continue to grow together, and how attendees can contribute to and participate in them.
ZineCat is a centralized database of zine catalog records, and a searchable database of holdings information, that will provide digital content when available. It will save a researcher’s time by collocating metadata from many disparate sources and will allow under-resourced zine libraries to copy and share catalog records.
The Zine Thesaurus is a hierarchical thesaurus of subject terms that are more accessible, current, and radical than standard subject thesauri such as Library of Congress Subject Headings. It is used in zine library catalogs and collections around the world and will be integrated into ZineCat. It was developed by an independent zine library in Canada and is updated and maintained by a dispersed group of zine librarians, with mechanisms for broad community feedback on choice of terms and contributions of new terms.
Centering on the ZineCat and thesaurus examples, we will provide an overview of the projects, how they were developed, where they’re headed, and how they use open source platforms to aggregate open data. We will discuss challenges in sustaining collaborative, international projects, independent of institutional support and how we grapple with the problems inherent in sharing information online (i.e. with respect to zine author anonymity, etc.).
ZineCat and the thesaurus are creator-centric projects because many members of the zine libraries community are zine makers, as well as zine custodians, though the catalog serves researchers and pleasure readers, as well as zine makers. This presentation will end with a call to welcome new contributors and contributions, as the projects are still in active development!
We have just updated our page on ZineLibraries.info. Check it out for a quick summary of what we’ve been up to. For those of you who are unfamiliar with ZineLibraries, it is a zine libraries interest group maintained by a collective of people interested in all aspects of zine libraries. It has been going strong since 2007! Subscribe to their newsletters to stay up to date with all things zine-library-related.
The RBMS Bibliographic Standards Committee‘s Program Planning Group will be holding its Cool Things We’ve Cataloged Lightning Talks on Friday, October 28, 2022 at 3pm EST.
In this webinar Amy Swanson, Geanna M. Hernandez-Phan, Kim Schwenk, Leia Lynn, and Linh Uong will be discussing interesting and challenging collections or items they have cataloged. These include Risograph-printed zines, mystery novels, a 17th century legal document, and a collection of STEM kits.
To join us, please register here for the login information.
Last week we discussed the Homosaurus, so we thought we should also feature the similarly important work being done by Anchor Archive! For those who don’t know, Anchor Archive uses its own customized thesaurus of subject terms (or keywords) to describe zines in their collection. They developed it between 2008 through 2013 because they wanted to use subject terms that were more accessible, current, and radical than standard subject headings, like the Library of Congress Subject Headings. This Zine Subject Thesaurus is used by other zine libraries and zine collections around the world, including at ZineCat!
You can find the full Zine Subject Thesaurus here. The Anchor Archive is currently updating its thesaurus in collaboration with other zine librarians. Please do get in touch if you would like to get involved. Email them at anchorarchive AT gmail.com and follow them on Instagram @anchor_archive.
Last month at the Zines + Libraries Conference, we learned about the incredible work of The Homosaurus. The Homosaurus is an international linked data vocabulary of LGBTQ terms that supports improved access to LGBTQ resources within cultural institutions. Designed to serve as a companion to broad subject term vocabularies, the Homosaurus is a robust and cutting-edge vocabulary of LGBTQ-specific terminology that enhances the discoverability of LGBTQ resources.
This vocabulary is intended to function as a companion to broad subject term vocabularies, such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings. Libraries, archives, museums, and other institutions are encouraged to use the Homosaurus to support LGBTQ research.
To support the project, purchase a shirt from their online shop! T-shirts are currently on sale for $15 until tomorrow (8/10) at 5pm CT.
This t-shirt could be yours! Purchase at their online store. All sale proceeds are used to support the project or are donated to LGBTQ+ organizations.
To wrap up International Zine Month, we are remembering zinesters that are no longer with us. This HalloZine, we are we thinking of Jude Vachon. Vachon was a librarian who started the zine library at the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh in 2008. One of her most widely known projects was a resource she created called Be Well! Pittsburgh. It began as a zine and later became a website, offering detailed lists of Pittsburgh-area healthcare practitioners and clinics available to the poor, the uninsured, and the underinsured. Jude Vachon also co-organized the Feminist Zine Fest Pittsburg with Jayla Patton and Anne Schwann. The reverberations of her work continue to impact the greater zine community.
Feminist Zine Fest Pittsburgh organizers Jayla Patton, Anne Schwann and Jude Vachon Image Credit: Pittsburgh City Paper
Take this HalloZine to revisit Jude’s contribution to Learning to Love You More:
Go and watch some birds. But allow yourself to be intimate about it, and to participate in it yourself. Do not to be an observer with a field guide. Crows are very, very smart. So smart they’ll make you laugh out loud. Feed them several round cookies and watch how they stack them before they make off with them. If you invest yourself they will usually be up for a personal relationship with you, over time. If you’re in the Mid-Atlantic region, watch the huge throngs of starlings gathering and playing all over the skies together and having conferences in trees before they head south for the winter. They are really very good at being loud together. Blue Jays are huge bitches. They are mean and nasty and scream. Enjoy that. There’s much more. Do whatever is necessary to make room for this. I do mean whatever is necessary. It’s serious.
Learning to Love You More is both a web site and series of non-web presentations comprised of work made by the general public in response to assignments given by artists Miranda July and Harrell Fletcher. Yuri Ono designed and managed the web site.
This zine is a charming riso-printed booklet dedicated to exploring love and intimacy between queer friends and platonic lovers. It features submissions from queer, trans, and non-binary artists of colors. Broken Pencil also selected this zine for Group Zine of the Year in 2021.
Mixed Rice Zine is a small DIY press run by artist J Wu, featuring a mixture of voices that celebrate QTBIPOC resilience. Their zines invite queer and trans artists of color to send in writing, photography, comics, poetry, interviews, illustration and more.
Every discussion of zines will inevitably intersect with Riot Grrrl, a punk feminist movement that emerged in the late 1980s and early ’90s in reaction to pervasive sexism, racism, and homophobia in the punk music scene and in the culture at large. Emphasizing female and youth empowerment, collaborative organization, creative resistance, and DIY ethics, the Riot Grrrl movement generated hundreds of self-published zines. A sampling of zines, posters, and printed matter from the 1980s and ’90s can be found in this fabulous book, edited by Lisa Darms and published in 2013.
A flyer by Kathleen Hanna of the band Bikini Kill sets out her manifesto for change; and the first issue of the zine Riot Grrrl, by Molly Neuman and Allison Wolfe, July 1991. Image Credit: The Feminist Press
About the Editor
Lisa Darms is Senior Archivist at the Fales Library & Special Collections at NYU, and founder of the Fales Riot Grrrl Collection. She holds an MA in History and Archival Management from NYU, an MFA in Photography from the University of Washington, and a BA from the Evergreen State College. Her writing has been published in The Believer, Women & Performance Journal, and Archivaria. Before coming to archives she taught photography, worked as a custom photo printer, and was a member of the collaborative art group Thin Ice. Darms grew up in British Columbia, Canada.
July 21st is Zine Library Day! To celebrate, we wanted to highlight the Queer Zine Library. The Queer Zine Library is a UK-based DIY mobile library with an emphasis on radical LGBTQIA+ self-publishing.
Inspired by the Hong Kong-based Queer Reads Library, Queer Zine Library collection was officially formed in June 2019 with the first iteration of the Queer Zine Library taking place at Gunnersbury LGBT Late event in 2019. Since then, it has travelled across the UK in pop-ups and residencies.
Queer Zine Library is led by a collective of volunteers who catalogue, fundraise, host workshops, and develop the collections. The library includes 800+ zines and self-published material. The majority of these zines are published in the UK, Europe, and USA from 1980s to present day. These zines include perzines, fanzines, chapbooks, community newsletters and small press comics. They span themes of activism, queer punk, fandom, sex, relationships, mental health, LGBT spaces and nightlife.
Follow them on Instagram and be sure to check out their incredible digital catalogue. Currently, about a 1/4th of their collection is catalogued.
A sampling of some of the zines in the Queer Zine Library. Image Credit: Queer Zine Library
P.S. This is still a relatively new development, but ZineCat and the Queer Zine Library have been in conversation to add their collection into our database in the near future once we streamline our ingest process. We are very excited!
Last Friday July 8th, our project co-manager Jenna Freedman spoke about issues in zine cataloging. Informed by her experience as the zine librarian at Barnard College, Freedman talked about how to use resources like subject headings, genre and format terms, summaries, and MARC to make rich records. The discussion was also informed by critical thinking about racial, ethnic, gender, and other creator identities. Though metadata may seem sometimes innocuous, Jenna importantly stressed that cataloging is political.
Check out the Issues in Zine Cataloging guide Jenna created for the discussion. Many thanks to Jenna for facilitating this thoughtful conversation and producing this informative guide!
Freedman also touched upon xZINECOREx and MARC and their semi-equivalencies.
About Jenna
Jenna Freedman (she/her) is the Curator of the Barnard Zine Library at Barnard College in New York City. She makes an annual zine called Lower East Side Librarian and one-off zines on topics including jury duty, menstruation and menopause, and niche cataloging discussions on the library email list AUTOCAT.
