Rice-Aron Zine Collection (my process)

When arrived in Vermont and began working with The Marlboro College Rice-Aron Library’s zine collection (library website is HERE. LibraryThing page is HERE.) I started by putting of the zines in a pile, making a little bit of a mess. It was a great and rare luxury reserved for small informal libraries that are essentially closed (save for a few lone researchers making use of the library’s Rudyard Kipling archive, a couple straggling students, and people from the music camp that occupy the campus during the summer looking for DVDs to watch) and for small collections being built up from scratch. However, I later found that this activity is basically the same when dealing with cataloging or reorganizing any library collection. The only difference is that I did not have any records to work with, no one really knew what was in the collection, and I was able to come up with a way to organize it. I didn't have to fit it within Dewey and the rest of the collection.

I started by sorting out what I already knew from the pile of zines. I have been reading and collecting zines for almost ten years now and I am really familiar with the format and its variations. I knew that the Rice-Aron collection contained a number of zines by Marlboro students and faculty, so I separated all those out. This was easily done because most of the names were familiar to me. There are only 315 students at Marlboro College so it is pretty easy to know most of them by name, even after you graduate. I also knew that most zines fell into three genres (personal zines, D.I.Y./how to zines, and political zines) so I also separated those out. Political and D.I.Y. zines often have really clear and precise titles so this was easy to do. I am most familiar with personal zines so much of the collection I had actually read or knew enough about to identify. Whenever I saw a zine in a different language I also separated it out into a smaller pile. The same was true of zines that needed to be repaired (I spent a great deal of time restapling, taping, and repairing zines throughout the internship).

This left me with a much smaller pile of zines that still needed to be filed and the following established subjects/genres: Personal Zines, Political Zines, D.I.Y. Zines, Zines in Other Languages, and Marlboro Zines.

As I sorted through the unfiled zines I began noticing patterns that revealed the rest of the subjects/genres the collection would need.

For example, Many of the political zines were actually reprinted writings from famous activists or theorists (Emma Goldman, for example) and these fit well with the history zines I was finding. Similarly, the zines about health and sexual health seemed to go well with some D.I.Y. zines dealing with comparable topics. Through this process of reevaluating the collection and reclassifying zines I ended up with the following genres/subjects: (Sexual) Health, Animal Rights and Bikes, Art and Comics, Fiction and Poetry, and Prison Zines.

When trying to figure out how the zine collection should be physically organized I considered my zine collection and the other zine libraries and shops I had previously visited. I knew that zine collections that are shelved like books easily end up really disorganized and are hard to browse. Zines also tend to get damaged when stored this way because they are often frail to begin with. The same is true of magazine racks, which tend to work a little bit better for browsing but can be physically hard on the zines. I keep my zines in magazine storage boxes and thought that they might be good for this collection. I liked that the zines could be moved, shelved, and browsed easily with minimal handling. I also thought that, since the collection was going to be maintained primarily by student volunteers and student workers, I needed a system that required the least effort to maintain. Boxes are pretty low effort and it doesn't take much to match a sticker on a zine to a sticker on a box.

After organizing the collection into the genres/subjects mentioned above, I began scanning their covers. After browsing other zine collections on LibraryThing I noticed that not many of the zines had cover images and that those that did either had poor scans or slightly different covers (something that is not particularly uncommon for zines). I really wanted to have decent scans so the library could use the images again, if the need arose. I plan on uploading all of these images along with images of my extensive punk and hardcore patch collection soon. I'll post a link when it is done.

Most of the zines that I tagged were personal zines because they typically had vague titles. Many of the other zines had titles that were so specific that additional tags were unnecessary and would not aid in searching the collection. For example, if a zine was tagged "Political" and its title was "Anarchism," there was really no reason to then tag it with "Anarchism." This was also partially done to save time because cataloging, scanning, and physically organizing 300+ zines and then designing their containers and the collection's signage was pretty time consuming (especially when cataloging and doing other jobs around the library). In retrospect I am not sure this was the best idea and I probably would have made a bigger effort to tag these items had there been more time. I also decided not to tag certain items because most users browsed the zine collection, it wasn't a research collection, and because the covers were scanned. From all of this information people would likely have enough information to decide whether they wanted the item or not.

I always added Series Information and issue numbers to the Common Knowledge section of LibraryThing. I always used the word "number," even if the actual zine referred to them as something else (like "issue"). I did this for consistency, but I would not have made this decision after this last semester's advanced cataloging courses.

I also added any other information I knew about the zines or was readily apparent (important places, notes about additional artwork by someone else, etc.). I occasionally came across different printings with slight differences that I always included notes about. Sometimes I knew about these differences beforehand but sometimes I looked them up online. This is one area where I wish I had been more careful about noting where the information came from, although this might be counter the whole idea behind LibraryThing's Common Knowledge section. However, I thought this information was important because sometimes there were slight unnoted content differences and, for someone dealing with zines, a silk screened cover is much different than a photocopied one. I added book descriptions from Microcosm Publishing or other websites (personal or publishing) that were mentioned in the zine.

For the author I would use whatever name I could find, even if it was clearly fake.

The format for the publication information was as follows:

Low Hug Productions, Champaign, IL (Self Published) Zine, 53 Pages

If the publisher was just a business name for the same person who wrote the zine (you could tell by the address or the web page listed) I added "(Self Published)". If the publisher was a different person or organization then I left it out.

If there was no publisher information (it was presumably self published) but the zine was well established and listed in the mailing address (as in "contact Doris at this address" vs. "contact Cindy Crabb (the person who actually writes Doris) at this address") then I put that in lieu of a publisher.

Doris, Ashville NC (Self Published) Zine, 32 pages

Then whatever publication location information I could find and the number of pages. I counted pages when reasonable to do so. Sometimes, however, I took the page numbers from a publisher website. I wouldn’t do that now, at least not without putting this information in brackets. I also would more clearly define "self published." I think the distinction is important but remains hazy in my records. I also think that I tried to cram too much information into this field.

For the title information I used this format:

title: number (I always called it "number" for clarity and consistency, a mistake I would not make today) "subtitle" (if there was one)

Sometimes zine writers put out split zines that are either smaller/condensed issues bound together or collaborative zines. I used a slash (/) between the zine titles whenever this came up. For example:

Invincible Summer: Number 11 / Clutch: Number 17: Fifth Annual Split Zine by Nicole Georges (2006)

I ran into a lot of problems when dealing with reprinted political zines where several publishers, distributors, printers, and writers were named (presumably because the zine was claimed, reprinted, and sold by a number of different political groups that changed names and split off from one another throughout the 1990s). When in doubt, I listed them all.

For smaller collections I really I think LibraryThing can work well. In terms of cataloging time it is faster than cataloging the items using MARC, building a database, or creating an online interface for items cataloged in Dublin Core. It is also more versatile than a simple webpage. However, it does take getting used to and can be difficult for users to navigate at first.

It is also unfortunate that having a library thing account doesn't really increase the options available to users, which is a shame. Users should be able to review or assign tags to items not in their personal collections.

One of the strengths of LibraryThing is that users can easily browse and make connections with similar collections. It is often hard to find other collections containing zines or other ephemeral print items and I suspect that this would be a valuable feature for students doing serious research with zines.

I think LibraryThing (despite its faults) was a good choice for this collection and is a great way to maintain and promote collections in a smaller library. It also is an easy way to increase access to a collection that might otherwise just exist in lists on the library's webpage.