Zines are self-published, non-commercial, small-edition, generally periodical resources that often feature sub- or counter-cultural content and design choices. Zines are used as primary sources on social movements, social life, politics, art, music, and more. Currently, access to zines is distributed across a variety of data silos, such as library catalogs, finding aids, independent databases, spreadsheets, and text documents. Much of this data is created and maintained outside of traditional libraries by zine communities themselves, using available tools and ad-hoc standards or practices.
To enable global access to zines, a collaborative team of zine librarians, archivists, library catalogers, metadata specialists, and Web developers is working to build the Zine Union Catalog (ZUC), which will integrate digitized and digital content, bibliographic metadata, contextual resources, and access details in a single discovery platform for zine libraries and collections.
This presentation will first introduce the ZUC project, explaining how the team plans to: 1) aggregate heterogeneous data sources, 2) encourage broad participation in metadata creation with approachable resource description standards, 3) respond to evolving resource genres and research needs through extensible ontology/vocabulary development, and 4) balance the privacy concerns of zine creators with needs for authority control and collocation. In this section, audience members will learn how to effectively describe and build access to zine resources.
