Your friend Violet Fox (author of this very post) nearly forgot to promote her own webinar on this very website! Please join me, Dez Alaniz, and Dawn Stahura, as well as moderator Sophie Ziegler (also a zinester!) for a free webinar titled Zinesters as Librarians, Librarians as Zinesters. We’ll be talking about how being a librarian influences our zine practices and how being a zinester influences our library practice. If you’re looking for a webinar that’s speaks to your very, very niche interests of zines + libraries, join us for a fun discussion!

Edit to add: the recording of the webinar is now available!

Thanks very much to Library Juice Connections for suggesting and hosting this webinar! They’ve been terrific to work with.

Zine Scheme for STEM Library Engagement and Outreach, a paper by Denise Amanda Wetzel, Chasz Griego, Sara Kern, and Jacob E Gordon, was presented at the 2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition (the American Society of Engineering Education). The authors share information about zine history, making zines, and use cases both for libraries in general and for engineering students. The appendices include sample one-page zines from the authors’ institutions (Carnegie Mellon University and Pennsylvania State University), featuring info about wayfinding in libraries and pocket guides to resources for specific topics. If you’re looking for ways to use zines in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics, this paper might be a good place to start.

A few panels from a 1-page zine from the Patent and Trademark Resource Center

Dollops for Donuts, a podcast about the music history of Denver, interviewed Kelly Shortandqueer about the origins and growth of the Denver Zine Library. The podcast episode is well worth a listen if you’re interested in how zine libraries get started and how they can sustain growth thoughtfully! There’s also discussion of ZineCat (the Zine Union Catalog) at the 55-minute mark.

Volume 4, number 1 of Unbound: A Journal of Digital Scholarship is dedicated to zines, or, more precisely, made out of zines. Titled “Academizines!” and edited by Spencer D. C. Keralis and Zach Frazier, this special issue features contributors from across disciplines sharing their research and creative scholarship in zine form.

The whole issue is great, but these zines within the issue might be of special interest to zine librarians:

• Creative Zinergy: Student-led Zine Workshops and Research in an Academic Library / Jillian Sandy
• ZC/ZL: Imagining Relationships Between Zine Creators and Zine Librarians / Al Cassada
• Shared Authority: Zine Union Catalog Capstone Issue / Jenna Freedman, Lauren Kehoe
• Finding Zines in South and Southeast Asia / Zoë McLaughlin
• Heresy in the Library: Planting a Paradigm / jean amaral
• Caring for Digital Files / Sarah Glover
• Audre Lorde in the Hunter College Libraries / Dorian Onifer

A news article in The Richmonder describes the creation of Celebrating Trans Joy: Building Communities, a 100+-page zine sponsored by the ACLU-Virginia. The article, Richmond’s Trans Community Embraces an Underground Literary Form: The Zine, discusses the importance of trans visibility in libraries such as the Library of Virginia and the Richmond Independent Zine Library.

cover of the book Celebrating Trans Joy: Building Communities

REFORMA, the The National Association to Promote Library and Information Services to Latinos and the Spanish-Speaking, will host a webinar about Latino-created zines on Tuesday May 20th. “Latino Zines: Celebrating Our Cultures and Communities”
will also discuss the libraries that are developing zine collections to preserve and share these unique creations. Speakers:

• Ziba Perez, Zine Librarian at L. A. Public Library, L.A. Zine Fest & ALA Zine Pavillion Co-Organizer, REFORMA Board member
• Rosa Celestino Bernal, Reference and Instruction Librarian and Information Studies Professor at Santa Ana College and Los Angeles Valley College.
• Medar de la Cruz, Cartoonist/ Illustrator, Digital designs, Ink drawings, Rikers Public Memory Project
• Iván Salinas is a Mexican writer & zinester based in the San Fernando Valley. He is the co-founder of Drifter Zine and Paloma Press

Excited to learn about La Fanzinoteca del Museo Universitario del Chopo (the zine library at the Museo Universitario del Chopo, part of the National Autonomous University of Mexico) in Mexico City. Multiple collections highlight different topics such as alternative comics, contemporary Mexican fanzines, and punk culture in Mexico. Full scans of many zines are available on the site in addition to finding aids.

Excited to hear about the new Zines Forever! DIY Publications and Disability Justice exhibit at the Wellcome Collection in London. The display draws on some of the 1,300 zines at the Wellcome and “explores how the making and sharing of zines can further disability activism and political resistance and serve as a vehicle for community building and mutual support.”

A nice article from the Carleton College student newspaper, “Special Collections and Art History Department host ‘Library on Legs’ event,” written by Clare O’Connor. The article describes a “Library on Legs” event hosted by Gould Library’s Special Collections and the Department of Art and Art History, along with a library display and a zinemaking workshop from a local artist.

Swiss librarian Guillaume Pasquier’s blog, Biblog, is subtitled “a digital librarian’s notebook” and features interesting stories about libraries and books. A recent post, Dans les magasins, des mag-… euh, des fanzines, shares his discovery of ” the richness of the fanzine universe.” Guillaume invites librarians in the Geneva area to a January 2025 group visit to the Geneva fanzine library (La fanzinothèque genevoise). I hope there will be a followup post with highlights from the tour!