America's Next Top Information Professional

Just in case you haven’t seen this elsewhere, the winners of the Copus Year of Science Zine-a-thon have been announced.

Here’s the lovely grand prize winner, Meeting a Giant Octopus, by Chen Dou of Gaithersburg, Maryland:

Giant Octopus!!!

I’m on a listserv for zine librarians, and this morning someone sent out a link to this blog explaining why Duke’s Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture has chosen not to digitize the 4000 zines in their collection. Although the librarian acknowledges that digitization would increase access and minimize physical wear on the items, she points out certain characteristics of zines which make them awkward to digitize. Namely, getting permission, honorably using fair use to deal with copyright, protecting zinester privacy, and respecting print culture. It’s a well-considered statement, raising concerns about the strive to digitize.

I had the odd experience last month of cataloging a few of my own zines, at my beloved Zine Archive and Publishing Project in Seattle. See, when I make zines, I don’t usually put my name on them. I enjoy the freedoms that come through anonymity. But when I was filling out the catalog record, I felt an obligation to enter the information. (There’s no AACR for zines, so this was a homegrown protocol developed by folks at ZAPP, which includes doing research outside the item to fill in information gaps.) The librarian in me won.

Some of these issues, particularly around cataloging and authority control came up at the Zine Librarians (un)Conference last March. The ties to print culture are really very strong, perhaps in part because so many zine librarians also make and read print zines themselves. Nonetheless, for one example of a great digital zine collection is the fantastic Queer Zine Archive Project.