Zinesters who LibraryThing Message Board

Okay, I started this group because it seems like there are a fair number of folks who read/make zines in the LibraryThing universe and I thought it would be fun for us to talk about zines and whether or not LibraryThing is a useful instrument for cataloging them. And whatever else we felt like talking about.

About me: I am the zine librarian at the Zine Archive & Publishing Project in Seattle. A long time ago I did a zine called Murmurs and then a zine called Pearl Tongue. Now I sit in a basement room and catalog zines instead of making them. But I still read them! Some of my favorites are: Muffinbones, Subject to Change, Doris, Slant, Bamboo Girl, Ring of Fire, Cometbus, Mystery Date, Thriftscore and oh so many more I just can't even begin to list them here.

Hey! We share a lot of cool books (just popped up when I joined ;) I'm working on a sort of historical zine project here in London, and finding places that sell zines. There's a book art fair this Sunday that I'm excited about.

What do you do about cataloguing zines? And how about storing them? Mine are in a shoebox... My current favourite is Misfit Toy out of Toronto where I used to live.

I started to catalog a few, but it didn't seem right. Is there a better way than typing them in by hand? (Some of mine don't have dates, too, which makes it confusing.)

I don't have a too many zines but I did enter some of them manually and then stopped. I guessed at the dates on many. It was an incomplete effort but still is interesting to see who else may have the same ones in their library.

I added a couple more. I have stacks and stacks of Bust and Bitch, but I don't think they really count as zines.

Oh hey, I picked up Megan Kelso's Scheherazade: Stories of Love, Treachery, Mothers, and Monsters today.

Scheherazade is great.. Have you read Squirrel Tales by megan kelso too? It's really haunting...

I ordered it, but it hasn't come in yet.

I'm cataloging them in here, though it takes awhile. And I've been able to pull some images of them from folks' websites, like Colin Kennedy Donovan's Fuck Pity (www.cripqueer.com). Right now, I've just been shelving my zines along w/ my other books, but have been thinking about having a shelf devoted to zines. I also am excited about cataloging my zines in LT because it helps spread the word about zines I love.

*And* I highly recommend zines by the fabulous, the amazing, the beautiful william maria rain.

'siyo,

This is a really cool book arts resource that have me 10gajillion ideas for zines.

Artits' Books

'siyo/hi folks,

I wanted to pass word along about this. Please pass word along!
**

Conference on Cultural Rhetorics
May 16-18, 2007
East Lansing, MI
Michigan State University

Call for Papers, Performances, and Exhibits

What are cultural rhetorics? Who writes, performs, displays, digitizes, crafts, and creates these rhetorics? What do they look like? How do specific cultural rhetorics differ from, overlap with, and/or engage in dialogue with Cultural, Ethnic, African American, Asian American, American Indian, Arab and Middle Eastern American, Chicano/a, Latina/o, Indigenous, Disability, Queer/LGBT, Performance, and Working-Class Studies? What are their relationships to Rhetoric Studies, Theory, and Pedagogy? Composition Studies? American Studies? Literary Studies? Digital, Visual, and Material Rhetorics? Scientific, technical, and professional communication studies? Are there pedagogies of cultural rhetorics? Methodologies? Theories? Performances? Materialities?

We welcome papers, performances, and exhibits that articulate, engage with, provoke, analyze, theorize, and practice cultural rhetorics. We are particularly interested in scholars/artists/performers/writers/knowledge workers that engage rhetorics that are too often marginalized, tokenized, silenced, and ignored. We welcome work that happens at the intersection of various disciplines and fields in the humanities and invite scholars, artists, and writers to join us at these intellectual and creative crossroads. Please join us in creating a space of radical interdisciplinarity in which to explore rhetoric as a distinctive constellation of methods, methodologies, and pedagogies for the study of culture and to think through how the frame of “culture” expands our understanding of rhetoric and the responsibility for rhetoric to be ethical in its engagement with culture.

While we are very interested in proposals for individual papers and panel presentations that address these questions and/or further scholarship in these areas, we especially encourage art, craft, multimedia, or imaginative resentations/demonstrations/installations that provoke other methods of intellectual engagement as well.

Proposals of 300-500 words may be submitted via US Mail or online. For the proposal form and submission process please visit our website: http://rhetoric.msu.edu/cultrhet. Please direct any questions to Malea Powell at powell37@msu.edu.

The deadline for submissions is January 1, 2007.

It seems this group has gotten quiet but I decided to join anyhow. I just cataloged all my zines. I'm finding, suprisingly that there are others who have already added some of the zines I have. (Ones that you can find on Microcosm or bookstores.) The ones that I'm not finding are usually local ones. I've started adding images of the covers as well. I definitely consider them part of my library! I've even found that a library I donated my zine too had cataloged it!

This group/idea is great! The high school library I work at just started a zine collection and it never occurred to me to add them on librarything. Looks like I have a new project!

There's a good book out there for zine librarians, Fron A to Zine : Building A Winning Zine Collection in Your Library by Julie Bartel. It's aimed at public librarians who may not be familiar with zine culture but there are a lot of good tips on organization and cataloguing in it too.

Hi all! I'm Sonya, and I'm the newest LibraryThing employee.

I'm also a zinester, and I would love to think out loud here about what we can do to make this a zine-happy place.

Big thoughts include finding a way to easily add more zines (maybe talking to more zine libraries about using LibraryThing to host collections), and small ideas like adding infoshops and stores to LibraryThing Local.

I'm a volunteer at the Papercut Zine Library, so I figure I can make them think about these things too.

At the Papercut Zine library, we have them shelved like books (spine out).
http://www.papercutzinelibrary.org/

At home, I have a little separate section to keep them from being CRUSHED by heavier books. I bought really cheap magazine holders from Ikea, and am slowly filling them. I'll post a picture if I think of it.

Right now, I'm into medical zines - I'm going to do a review of medical zines for Library Journal - and I'm looking at the kind of information they provide that you can't get from your MD, how reliable it is, etc. Most of what I'm finding is related to sexual health, not surprisingly.

So, I usually totally cheat when I'm cataloging and check and see if any of the major distros (like Microcosm) have a zine, to see if they magically have a date. I usually otherwise guess if I can, like this - 1998?

At Papercut, zines are shelved by category, which means choosing ONE thing to represent a zine. Not fair.

Oooh, post a link to your LJ article on medical zines when it's done! That sounds really interesting.

Turns out I'm not medically eligible for egg donation, but I had considered it as a way to make money--what stopped me is reading a zine written about the process by someone who'd done it. I'm a little squeamish about stuff being done to my body in a medical context, it seems... ;)

I'm newish to LibraryThing and even newer to the concept of adding zines (and other alt press items) to an LT catalog. But I was really excited when I read Katie Haegele's article in the Philadelphia Inquirer about cataloging her zine collection using LT. The idea continues to excite me even though I do see that there are some obstacles. I hear from the Google Group, Zines+LibraryThing, that the problem of not being able to just click and add a zine that someone else added manually to their catalog is being looked into by the good folks at LT, and will hopefully be resolved in some way.

(I wonder if Microcosm and LT would consider teaming up for more content providing?)

Also, you know that Columbia University Library (CLIO) has a number of zines, so you can always check their catalog when adding.

I have lots more to say on the topic, but for now, I'd like to encourage zinesters to not give up on LibraryThing! I think that zines in archives are a big deal, and zines in virtual archives is its own exciting thing, and zines in an environment as populated (esp by librarians) as LT can only be really good for the increased visibility of alternative publishing.

See my Small Press Blog today for an interview with zinester/zine researcher, Wred Fright, about zines in research, zines in academic collections, and the preservation of zines:

See
http://myspace.com/ldpdistro for April 21, 2008
or
http://blog.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=blog.view&friendID=259082034&am...

Attention Zinesters and zine collectors, especially those in possession of defunct zines and having access to a scanner: I just found a zine repository living on Flickr that is attempting to archive the covers of Zines of years past, and wants you to join and upload:

Check out:
http://flickr.com/groups/zine_repository/pool/

This could also help zinesters on LibraryThing, who can download zine covers to add to their catalogs.

hello there fellow zinesters,

i have been gently exploring librarything for a while and now i found out you can catalogue zines here i think im hooked. i recently inventoried my zines and will catalogue them here in good time. i didnt actually think about doing that before i stumbled across this group!

here's the inventory:
http://storage.mujinga.net/mujinga_zine_library07082008.html

if anyone knows a good way to get the zines inventorised here without manual input, i would be pleased to hear it! although i must say that adding them one by one has a certain perverse charm to it too.

i enjoyed http://zinewiki.com before its unexpected demise. another site worth recommending in case people don't know it already is http://zinelibrary.info

the zines i make are online at my website, http://mujinga.net

thanks for the links up above, i will be interested to read the wred fright interview - if you haven't read his two dissertations on zine culture i would heartily recommend them.

cheers and happy zining!

One million years later ...

There is an importer:
http://www.librarything.com/import

And you can contact, oh, I'd say Chris (conceptdawg) if you have something trickier.

Hi everyone! I am a zinester based in Chicago, and I have about 100 zines (and independent comix) posted in my Library Thing. Some of my favorite zine and comix authors are Ayun Halliday, John Porcellino, Shawn Granton, Lille Carre, Anders Nilson, Marc Bell, and Jeffrey Brown.

I have a few zines too. Info on my website: http://www.trylesshard.com/sarah

Hi there,

Looks like this group is in a coma, but maybe if I leave a message here, an eyelid or two will begin to flutter...

I'm doing an assignment for an MLIS course where we have to make a rationale for cataloguing a collection, suggesting appropriate metadata fields and creating some sample records. I'm intending to use the scenario of a zine collection, suggesting that LibraryThing be used. A good argument in support of LibraryThing is that it's often difficult to describe zine contents using a traditional cataloguing approach - often the subject headings just don't apply or at least require a leap of imagination from the person searching the catalogue. With LibraryThing of course you can assign tags and there is the potential to crowdsource the cataloguing by getting users to add their own tags, hopefully generating more meaningful descriptions over time.
The problem is, in order to tag a zine, I need to add it to my own collection right? In the case of a library collection, it's likely that each zine has to be manually added, therefore it won't show up in the usual sources (LoC, Amazon etc). Is there a way of adding a library's manually added titles to my collection or do I have to re-create them myself?

Hello? Anyone out there want to get this group out of the dormant cataloger? I'm a zine cataloger at the Soapbox Zine Library and Philadelphia, and would love to reach out to other zine librarians/archivists/makers, etc.

Anyone still around?