Zines resurgent

Kentucky Libraries, 2017

As the curator of Zineopolis-Art-Zine collection at the University of Portsmouth, I set the aim of the collection to archive and reflect the diversity of thought and talent that exists outside the traditional publishing arena. Zines are one of the few areas left where creative people can speak without censorship to an audience beyond the gallery. This makes the world of zines new and exciting as well as challenging, with Art-Zines especially-the tactility and aesthetic of the self-published artifact is an important consideration. The nature of production, often cheap and quick, means these Art-Zines reflect the thoughts and hopes of the day (quite literally). Zineopolis is located within the School of Art and Design so it was a deliberate choice to focus upon image-heavy zines, although we have examples of poetry-zines, personal-zines and fan-zines. The culture of zines shows us that people do still have opinions, it also shows us that traditional conduits for sharing thoughts are probably not as accessible as we'd like to think. The Zineopolis collection seeks to archive and celebrate the self-publishing boom. Zineopolis is primarily a non-virtual collection where items can be handled and flicked-through, many have novelty items, unusual packaging, unconventional bindings, or unusual materials, this collection (although archived online) is sensorial delight in the 'physical'. This paper will show examples of what, zineopolis considers, constitutes the Art-Zine.

Serials Review, 1995

Printing of ~~b~~~~ous outside of &&5al channels has been a phenomenon veiny since the advent of the printing press, Even though excluded from the mainstream for having messages too obscure, extreme, or unmarketable, people through the ages have produced an unsilenced stream of publications reflecting the per-son& tie i&@, or tfre lkane. In the modem era, self-published material has contemptuously come under the rubric of the "vanity press" or the more respectable "chap book;"' for the work of little known poets. Another hidden venture of person& pnb~~shing is the '%ne ~~~~~0~~~ known as 'Yanzine") as a forum for offbeat and amateur communication. Their appearance is usually marked by the 1930 publication of The Cmet, a science fiction/fantasy, self-produced magazine. Most of the early underground zinc proto~~s were of sir&~ thematic mater&I with comic art pub~i~a~ons being the second most prevalent up until the late 1980s. The current upsurge in zinc publishing was engendered by the easy and cheap availability of photo copiers, which allow the would-be publisher to print extremely smaB press runs (some as low as five to ten) and stiff qualify within the genre. Factsheet Five, which tracks current tines in a quarterly publication, estimates there are tens of thousands of zincs in existence with the focus having moved light-years beyond science fiction. Subject areas are expansive; homeless groups put out tines such as S&e&We in Chicago and the radically charged

2015

Zines (as in magaZINE), are independent self-published, Do-It-Yourself (DIY) magazines, created out of a desire for self-expression rather than profit, and distributed in small runs. They’re highly personal, can be on any subject imaginable, and are made with an eclectic variety of materials, such as twine, string and glitter. Zines are awake and immediate in a manner that is unlike any other medium. To me, they are powerful tools used to represent the underrepresented in society. They offer a platform to people on the fringes, whose voices are ignored or misrepresented in mainstream publications and traditional libraries.

This research project investigates intellectual access to fanzines and zines in different types of libraries and archives with significant collections of these self-published serials. Building upon prior studies of zine collections by A. Knight (2004), K. Perris (2004), and R. Stoddart & T. Kiser (2004), the study asks four questions of public, academic, and alternative libraries and archives: Do they contain personal papers, thereby providing evidence of subcultural communication networks; do they provide a definition and contextual history of zines and/or fanzines; how may patrons access bibliographic data about the zines; and what kind of bibliographic data may be accessed? Access tools included in the study include databases, catalogs, finding aids, and inventories.

Recent attention has been paid to collecting born-digital, nontraditional, self-published forms, such as blogs and tweets. However, what of print-based, nontraditional, self-published materials? Before there were blogs, there were zines. Zines, much like blogs and tweets, are a challenging and difficult material to collect, but upon consideration of the concepts of Sandy Berman and James Danky, the onus is on academic libraries to have zine collections. An examination of ARL and CARL websites indicates that zine collecting is not a widespread practice in academic libraries; this article argues that, even in our contemporary digital, social-networked era, it should be.

Zines are increasingly becoming seen as legitimate subjects of collection development in libraries and archives. In this article, the author expands on a poster he co-created for the 2014 ALA Annual Conference that discussed the genesis and development of a zine collection at Cushing Memorial Library, Texas A&M University. This process involved the creation of a workable collection policy that slotted into existing library collection strategies, the initial and ongoing acquisition of zines, and the development of a promotional event that publicized the zine collection and brought to Texas A&M’s campus several zinesters and examples of their alternative voices.

Ethnologies, 1997

Independent DIY publications and the Underground Urban Cultures, 2021

The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 2019

Z ines are diy, self-published, short-run, small-circulation printed matter, usually in booklet form, often produced by a single creator or small group of creators in some sub-or counter-cultural context. As such, they contain and represent the voices and perspectives of countless marginalized communities: punks, anarchists, persons of color, persons with nonbinary gender identities, and so on. Their creation and distribution can be cathartic for their makers, very personal and intimate, the building blocks of subcultural community. Zine publishing exploded in the latetwentieth century, survived the advent of the internet, and continues to the present. Their creators include individuals who may or may not have Joshua Barton (MSU Libraries, W. Circle Dr. W109D, East Lansing, MI, 48824) is Head of Cataloging and Metadata Services, Assistant Head of Technical Services and Zine Librarian at Michigan State University Libraries. He is a co-editor of the Zine Librarians Code of Ethics 1.0 and co-author of the forthcoming Zine Cataloging: A Guide for Libraries and Independent Collections from Library Juice Press.