It seems Slideshare messes with my Drupal stylesheet, and since I don't have it in me right now to figure out why, I'll just give y'all the link to my slideshow instead of embedding it.
I am in Poitiers, France for an International Zine Libraries conference. That's Poitiers, not Paris. There are other cities in France, you know! As the founder of the Fanzinothèque here said in our meeting yesterday, the Fanzinothèque perhaps survived because it is here, not Paris, "Fuck Paris." Following is some basic info about the participating institutions.
Archiving Women was a one-day conference "bringing together scholars and archivists to examine feminist practices in the archive."
If I were a little more organized, I could share my notes, but unfortunately they're gone. Instead I'm going to bring up three different threads that for me characterized the event. They are preservation vs. privacy, the de-emphasis of the practitioner, and notable vs. common lives.
Background on what zines are and on the Barnard Library Zine Collection.
Discussion of the value of zines as research materials.
Discussion of three particular zines: Figure 8, Evolution of a Race Riot, and the "Fuck You, High School" issue of Boredom Sucks.
Women's Studies Conference panel, "Grrrls in the Library: the Collections and Preservation of Feminist Zines." My talk, "Self-Publication with Punk Rock Ideals: Zines ≠ Vanity Press Publications." New Haven, CT, October 18, 2008.
Zines are self-published, but the motivation behind their publication is different than that driving many vanity press and chapbook authors. The principles of punk rock and riot grrrl community are fundamental to zines, not just as the cultures that birthed them in their current incarnation, but also as what separates them from other self-publications. By collecting and preserving zines, the non-music primary sources of punk rock, librarians are documenting these movements in the participants’ own voices—the voices of those too young, too politically radical, too crusty, and/or too bad mannered to appeal to the corporate media. It is important to note that zine producers are not only people who have been relegated to the margins but also people who have chosen to claim the margins. In contrast to most writers, many zine producers might choose to reject an offer from corporate publishing house. Why let someone else control what you can say, when you can do it yourself? This presentation will address the politics and cultural motivations of zine publication and contrast them with other types of self-publication. Focusing specifically on materials from Barnard College’s open-stack zine collection that uses riot grrrl and other third wave feminist zines to enhance its research-oriented Women’s Studies book collection, this paper will go on to explore why zines belong in established library collections.
