The Center for 21st Century Studies, in coordination with Milwaukee Zine Fest, hosted a roundtable discussion on April 5, exploring key issues in the archiving of zines in today’s digital world. Jenna Freedman (Barnard College Library, New York), Milo Miller (UW-Milwaukee and the Queer Zine Archive Project) and Lane Hall (English, UW-Milwaukee) participated in this roundtable as panelists. They discussed some of the best practices for collecting, digitizing and sharing zines.
Zines are self-published and non-commercial ephemeral documents that often promote social justice by offering an easily accessible mode of expression for feelings and inequalities. They played an important role in the development of the Queercore and Riot Grrrl movements in the 1980s and 1990s. Historically, zines have been instruments of protest and change, a medium of communication and a tool for creating communities in which subcultures and marginalized groups share their stories, experiences and opinions. At today’s political moment with all the tensions and untrustworthy news and the media, zines are more important than ever. The overshadowed voices of minorities, LGBT communities, women and other subcultures need to be heard through other alternative outlets such as zines. Now that we need them more than ever, it is important to think more about what happens to them after publication and circulation. Where they should live? How can their social values be preserved? How can zines be effectively collected, shared, and used in educational institutions and libraries? Do they need to be digitized and accessible online?
One of the major transformations of the humanities at the beginning of the 21st century is a shift from analogue to digital source materials. More scholars and writers have been taking advantage of the computer and internet to explore different ways to make their work more dynamic and visually engaging. The digital humanities has had a significant impact on academic libraries. Libraries have moved to create continuing engagement and collaboration with the digital humanities community. Today, as institutions like universities and libraries are making space for zines in their collections, we need to pay more attention to ethical concerns associated with their preservation, digitization, and accessibility.
One of the fascinating concepts discussed in the panel was the idea of using zines as a pedagogical tool in institutional spaces like universities. Lane Hall talked about doing this as “decolonizing the space to detoxify our educational experience.” He believes zines are a powerful pedagogical tool for creative writing, empowering all the writers, particularly young writers. As professor of Media, Cinema and Digital Studies and Creative Writing, Hall talked about seeing zines as powerful objects within the process of culture making. There are many people engaged in this process. They build one or multiple networks and communities. As Hall mentioned, such communities create the potential spaces for appearance. Zines have long been a tool for political and social engagement among artists, activists and writers of subcultures. They create spaces for dialogue, pioneering conversations, and exchange of ideas- mostly invisible in the mainstream media. Zine archives are then spaces of appearance: the spaces that give subcultures the “right to appear,” to be seen and known.
One of the important questions brought up during the panel discussion was how the networks and communities connected to the zines can also be preserved in the process of archiving? How can we turn theses spaces of appearance into community-oriented spaces, spaces of resilience? Milo Miller, co-founder of the Queer Zine Archive Project, talked about their institution, which is a small collectively organized digital archive of LGBTQ+ zines. Their zine archive is a space with functions beyond just preserving, collecting, and sharing the zines. They have created a space for promoting zine culture. It is a space for coming together, eating, drinking, socializing and exchanging ideas. As a designer and zine maker, the feeling of holding the zines as objects in hand is very important for Miller. They believe digitizing takes away the power of the object. What are the benefits of digitization for these tactile objects? Do benefits outweigh the loss of materiality that accompanies digitization?
Jenna Freedman talked about her ongoing Zine Union Catalog (ZineCat) project, which is like WorldCat for zines. It is a powerful tool, a network of different zine archives libraries sharing information in an online platform, accessible to all. The 21stcentury has witnessed an increasing demand for access to online resources, but there has been always a debate about digitizing old and historic documents. Which one is more important, digitizing materials or providing item-level cataloging? As director of ZineCat and a digital humanities librarian, she explained how digitizing the documents is not the only important matter for digital archive libraries. As she said, “there are other ways of doing digital.” Different tactics can be used to change our expectations for digital experience. For her project, Freedman mostly focuses on online cataloging and descriptive access records online. She does not digitize all the zines in her collections. Her major goal is to make zines, and subcultures in general, visible. Freedman argues, “You don’t have to digitize it to make it visible.”
As previously mentioned, zine makers are usually individuals from marginalized communities, who see little of their lives and voices reflected in the mainstream media. Zines provide an alternative to the mainstream media’s misrepresentations of their lived experiences. Thus, it is significant to find more effective practices for collecting, preserving and sharing them with larger and more diverse audiences. Now that more libraries and archival institutions are making spaces for zines in their collections, they are more visible and accessible to the public, students and academic researchers. Projects like ZineCat are powerful tools for making zines more visible to all. It provides a digital resource platform where libraries share their zines and holdings information. This benefits scholars, writers, readers, librarians and activists to search and find out which zine library has the item they are looking for. Digitizing and online accessibility can help in preserving and making zines visible, but metadata sharing platforms like ZineCat play a more important role in this process by providing different formats of digital access, whether digitized zines or descriptive information about collections.