Day Two of the GLBT ALMS conference at the CUNY Grad Center. Less Process/Less Privacy: Implications of Minimal Processing for GLBT Collections with Jodi Berkowitz, Laura Micham, Heather Murray, and Minnie Bruce Pratt.
Day One of the GLBT ALMS conference at the CUNY Grad Center. Coming to Terms: LGBTIQ Thesauri, Folksonomies, and Taxononomies with KR Roberto, Ellen Greenblatt, Michael Waldman, and Analisa Ornelas. And the same bad mannered know-it-all from the previous session.
Zines are important in archives for a number of reasons. First of all, they represent an important primary source of information for future historians. They usually come from subcultures that are poorly documented in the larger culture. Furthermore, unlike the traditional print media, they represent an unmediated rendition of people's experiences in a particular place and time distributed to a significant (albeit small) audience. Secondly, in a time when writing communities are increasingly digital ( e.g. blogs, myspace, facebook), the print culture of the zine world is unique in its sociology. People make zines, trade them with others, write letters, and meet other like minded people. The zine genre is almost as well known for its creation of community as it is for its contribution of physical documents.
Within the context of lgbt archives, the theme of building community is an important one. However, the traditional method of cataloging and housing zines (as monographs or serials) does little to preserve the context out of which the documents were created. Despite this, the culture of community still plays an important role and overlaps into archives preserving zines. This panel will present the views of queer zine collecting in academic as well as non-traditional archives and libraries. We will discuss the ways that the diy zine communities overlap into these collections, as well as the ways the larger parent institution shapes the type of community involvement.
Last weekend I attended the Women, Action & the Media conference at MIT in Cambridge, MA. It was generally empowering and exciting to be at an activist event with a probably 90%+ female population--to learn about all the inspiring work being done, especially by young and youngish women of color.
This workshop will introduce skills to novice and veteran media makers alike, encouraging them to 'research like a librarian,' providing tips on how to find and recognize appropriate resources for researching and fact checking their stories. The presenters will be happy to adapt this workshop to whomever is in the room, but the impetus for proposing it is sharing skills with those newer to advanced research and critical thinking. However, people who are already confident in their research skills will undoubtedly learn some things, too. The facilitators can field questions on fact checking and research, but also on the mysteries of tagging, RSS feeds and the like. Slides and handouts available from Radical Reference.
I'm attending and likely presenting at three conferences this spring, and I'm excited about each one in a way I rarely do about certain giant conferences that meet in such asinine places as Anaheim, California.
Here's my report back from ALA Midwinter 2008. I'll fill you in on my experiences with the Chinatown bus, radical librarian/radical techie love, the zine librarians meet-up, a white privilege workshop, Radical Reference, Movers & Shakers, and vegan eats.
