The Radical Cataloging of Queer Zines
Brett Bishop-Pullan, Hanna Pennington, Vella Voynova - INFO 653-02, Fall 2019
Cataloging Zines
Zines are challenging to catalog and make accessible. They are published inconsistently, creators use various names, and LCSH do not always apply to their diverse and personal content.
What are zines?
Zines are DIY self-published magazines that allow their creators to express their views and experiences without conforming to mainstream media standards. In the 1980s and 90s, zines were integral to the development of queercore culture.
Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) was founded in 2003. QZAP’s physical archive in Milwaukee, WI contains over 2500 zines. QZAP’s open access online archive of digitized zines contains over 600 queer zines.
xZINECOREx is a metadata schema for cataloging zines that was developed by QZAP and other zine librarians. xZINECOREx is based on Dublin Core, but customized for the specific needs of zine catalogers.
Image Sources: QZAP Facebook; Barnard Zine Library Facebook; Autostraddle.com
Radical cataloging allows librarians to showcase queer zines’ cultural and historical value and to make them more accessible and discoverable for patrons.
teachingtolerance.com
Radical Cataloging
Critique and adaptation of cataloging practices and methodologies to give voice to people and concepts that are under/misrepresented or difficult to access through subject searches.
Library Bill of Rights
I. Books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves. Materials should not be excluded because of the origin, background, or views of those contributing to their creation.
II. Libraries should provide materials and information presenting all points of view on current and historical issues. Materials should not be proscribed or removed because of partisan or doctrinal disapproval.
III. Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.
IV. Libraries should cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgment of free expression and free access to ideas.
V. A person’s right to use a library should not be denied or abridged because of origin, age, background, or views.
VI. Libraries which make exhibit spaces and meeting rooms available to the public they serve should make such facilities available on an equitable basis, regardless of the beliefs or affiliations of individuals or groups requesting their use.
VII. All people, regardless of origin, age, background, or views, possess a right to privacy and confidentiality in their library use. Libraries should advocate for, educate about, and protect people’s privacy, safeguarding all library use data, including personally identifiable information.
Classification
Thesaurus Problems:
Structural Problems:
The backbone of the library, reflects cultural and social power structures and personal biases of the people creating, amending and using these systems.
Radical Cataloging Practices
To serial or to monograph?
Do zines have authority records?
Zinesters write anonymously, under any name, first name only, more than one name, or even several versions of a name within a single issue.
Copyright
How does the zinester intend the zine to be read and distributed?
Provenance
Genre
Zines can be political, personal, intimate, compilations, split, tools for activists, culture and community specific, etc.
655 _7 ǂa Political zines. ǂ2 local
Subject Headings
Zines use slang and deal with issues like race, gender, and sexuality in an intimate way, which is not always served by LCSH.
Summaries
The personal character and vernacular language of zines means summaries and keywords have enhance subject headings when authorized access terms are inadequate.
Classification
How do we classify zines without forcing interdisciplinary and intersectional materials into subject categories?
Accessibility
Above all, zine librarians want to make zines accessible to patrons.
Library of Congress Subject Heading Authority file.
https://authorities.loc.gov/
LGBT Pride library display.
Photo by Antonia Green.
Queering the Catalog - Emily Drabinski
“Engaging queer theory and library classification and cataloging together requires new ways of thinking about how to be ethically and politically engaged on behalf of marginal knowledge formations and identities who quite reasonably expect to be able to locate themselves in the library” (Drabinski, 2013, p. 94).
emilydrabinski.com
Queer Zine Archive Project
Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP)
digitized zine archive.
archive.qzap.org.
Milo Miller, co-founder of QZAP with Chris Wilde. Photo by Chris Kohley.
xZINECOREx
xZINECOREx Record.
Comparison of Dublin Core and xZINECOREx fields.
Images from xZINECOREx: An Introduction by Milo Miller.
Zine Union Catalog - zinecat.org
Images: zinecat.org
Queer Zines
the Most Radical of Cataloging
Cataloging Queer Zines encompasses many practices of Radical Cataloging. It reconciles the two perspectives on the problems of modern classification by addressing the issues of terminology and identity in controlled vocabularies while incorporating the idea, borrowed from queer theory, that language can ever be fully corrected by creating and adapting new and existing classification structures.