Welcome to International Zine Month 2021! IZM is a project created by Alex Wrekk, of Stolen Sharpie Revolution fame, as a way to celebrate many aspects of zines and the zinester community. Every year Alex creates a flyer which provides day-to-day events: find a printable copy and a text version of the info in the flyer at Alex’s IZM page.
Please note that July 21 is Zine Library Day! Plan something special in your library!
On Wednesday May 19th, zine librarians Ziba Perez and Jenna Freedman will be presenting a workshop titled “Overthrow the 10-Page Paperarchy: Manifesto Zines.” They’ll be modeling zine-making as a means of challenging the white patriarchy and exploring the capacity for zines to highlight skills beyond those recognized and valued by the academy.
The workshop is part of the Critical Pedagogy Symposium cosponsored by METRO and ACRLY/NY. Registration is free; find more info at mnylc.org/cps.
Alex (@fanzines on Twitter) is maintaining a Google map of physical shops that sell zines around the world.
Lilith Cooper of the Edinburgh Zine Library, who is working on a PhD at the University of Kent with Wellcome, has shared their presentation and paper on the ethics of doing research with zines.
Missed this chapter when it first came out, but here’s a great lesson plan for undergraduates by librarian Emilee Mathews. She writes, “In this lesson plan, students critically engage the zine’s conceptual underpinnings and material production in order to reflect on their own nascent zine making practice. What meanings are created by appropriating another’s work, particularly that of another zinester, and does the meaning change when the student’s work is accessioned into the same archive in which they found it?”
Check out the open access chapter “Radical Appropriation in Zine Making,” one of the 17 available through ARLIS/NA’s “Fair Use in the Visual Arts: Lesson Plans for Librarians,” published in 2018.
Here’s a terrific blog post about the Edinburgh Zine Library! “For LGBT History Month, a guest blog post from Abi and Lili from the Edinburgh Zine Library” is a featured story on the Edinburgh Libraries blog. EZL is independent but is hosted by the public library (Central Library), making for a very cool relationship. Read about the inspiration behind the library’s creation and the projects that EZL has made happen during COVID-19 closures.
University of Nebraska at Omaha librarians Amy Schindler, Monica Maher, and Claire Du Laney collaborated with instructor Clare Maakestad and students in Introduction to Sociology sections to create zines on environmental topics. Read more about their project, including integration with UNO Libraries Archives and Special Collections, in “New Environmental Zines Combine Creativity and Research.”
Long time zine librarian Ann Matsushima Chiu talks about her work using zines in library instruction in a new interview with Raymond Pun. Ann discusses her most frequently used workshops, including a Zines 101 session, teaching information literacy concepts, and the “Zine-in-a-Hurry” workshop, where participants collaborate on a zine which is completed in about an hour! Check out the interview at Infobase.
University of Alberta School of Library and Information Studies MLIS student Rynnelle Wiebe created an essay & illustrated zine titled “Indigenous Zines and Academic Libraries” as part of a fall 2020 course. The course, “Indigenous Library and Information Studies in a Canadian Context,” was created by instructors Kayla Lar-Son and Tanya Ball included research into Indigenous principles, practices, and Indigenous methodologies. A bibliography includes a selection of Indigenous-created zines and resources about zines and Indigenous librarianship. Find the zine at https://indigenouslis.ca/indigenous-zines-and-academic-libraries/.
It’s still COVID Times, so the hands-on, community-building aspects of zine making can be less than ideal. That’s why I love this Chicago Public Library grab and go kit for kids and tweens that talks about how to make a zine at home. The kit comes in a plastic bag and includes pages for collaging, a glue stick, and a copy of “How to Make a One-Page Zine” by Sarah Mirk (get a free copy at Sarah Mirk’s website). Patrons need to supply scissors, paper, and a writing instrument.
Check out the video from zine librarian Alenka Figa sharing different types of zines and giving a tutorial about how to make a one-page zine out of a piece of scrap paper.
The International Zine Librarians unConference 2020 was a breathtaking experience and collaboration. Let’s document how we made it happen and our feels about it.
We want to cover the topics listed on this spreadsheet and welcome others. Contributions can take the form of narratives, lists, recipes, limericks, comics, or whatever you’ve got, but note that the mission is providing documentation for next time. You can layout your own piece or leave the design to the co-editors. Just be sure to leave us a nice margin!
Faciliator: Kelly M
Notes: Jenna
Attending: André, April, Ella, Jenna, Kelly, Kelsey, Matthew, Milo, Ziba
Inspired by a tweet from Kirsty Fife @DIYarchivist, here’s a compilation of archives-related zines. There’s a lot out there so this won’t be a complete list, but hopefully a good starting point! Continue reading
Here are the notes from our meeting! Action items highlighted.
Faciliator: Kelly M
Notes: Jenna
Attending: André, Ella, Jenna, Kelly M., Kelsey, Lilith, Matthew, Milo, Ziba (at the very end)
