Praxis #3 (2000), Republished by HOUDINI Magazine

Preserving Zines In The Library

As a senior high schooler in the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio preparing to enter the world of higher education, my tastes in music were shifting along with transitions that my life was going through. My best friend and I had discovered the vibrant world of punk music that was, and had been for over a decade, challenging mainstream culture to deal with the notion that punk culture did not die in the late seventies as many would have liked it to. Along with our curious exploration into a world of music-that seemed to articulate every emotion that a suburban teenager harbors within his or her own subconscious-we also found that this music came with its own cultural commentators. Maximum Rock W’ Roll's two-hundred page newsprint magazine found its way from California to our suburban record store on a regular schedule each month. We flipped through pages and pages of advertisements for bands we had never heard of and read articles by people who were, by their own proclamation, punk demigods. Through the pages of MRR we found others who were doing independent magazines, making music and, above all else, sharing ideas.

“...these independent magazines needed to be examined & documented as evidence of autonomous cultural creation in the midst of an American culture that privileges passive consumption over active participation.”

It didn’t take much to realize that we were being given an invitation to take part in creating our own culture. The ultimate democratic culture was ours for the taking. Such expression was not limited to the sphere of punk subculture, and I soon realized thousands of others were engaging in similar independent cultural creation that dealt with an infinite array of topics ranging from reflections on the nature of work to stories from the margins of sexual exploration.

As I began to work my way through graduate school, it was clear to me that this contemporary underground press represented something special that I think deserved the scrutinizing and celebratory attention of academic rigor. I knew there had been little work done examining this underground medium as a site for cultural negotiation (and thus worthy of academic interrogation). However, I still felt that these independent magazines needed to be examined and documented as evidence of autonomous cultural creation in the midst of an American culture that privileges passive consumption over active participation. In order for these magazines to be available for scrutiny, they need to be preserved and made accessible for future generations of scholars and enthusiasts. The responsibility for such collection and preservation rests, as I will discuss in the rest of this essay, on the shoulders of the academic library.

Opinions about the role that the library serves in our society are as diverse as the people that the libraries claim to serve. In an attempt to unify the vision of the library’s responsibility to the public as the twenty-first century approaches, The White House Conference on Library & Information Services convened in July of 1991 with a list of ninety-five recommendations for America’s libraries. In addition to the general recommendations for a reiteration of (or in some cases the initiation of) the library as an example of democratic inclusion-in respects to collections and service to the public-the conference offered a few prioritized recommendations.

One such recommendation focused on the development of collections suggesting that “libraries must have collections development policies which provide universal access to all forms of information and materials by meeting the diverse needs of users including, but not limited to; language and cultural background differences” (39). Expanding the scope of collections was also supported by a recommendation for increased attention to the preservation of information for future use. In it, the conference urged libraries to ensure “the nationwide preservation of information resources through the implementation of preservation training programs, utilization of non-paper media, and the development of new technologies and procedures” (53).

Almost fifty years before the White House Conference on Library & Information Services convened with its recommendations, the American Library Association (ALA) Council affirmed that libraries “are forums for information and ideas” by adopting six basic policies collectively recognized as the Library Bill of Rights. We can, and should, read the Library Bill of Rights as we would the United States Constitution. Not only is the Library Bill of Rights an articulation of the rights of the library as an institution, but we can also assume these rights to be responsibilities bestowed upon the library as an institution as well as the individuals involved in upholding that institution.

The first of these rights/responsibilities clearly defines that “books and other library resources should be provided for the interest, information, and enlightenment of all people of the community the library serves.” Not only are all materials available to serve the community expected to be included in the library, but also “materials should not be excluded because of

origin, background or views of those contributing to their creation.” The library is also guaranteed the right/responsibility to provide materials representing all points of view while also taking it upon itself to “challenge censorship (and) cooperate with all persons and groups concerned with resisting abridgement of free expression and free access to ideas.”

In addition to the Library Bill of Rights, an American Library Association Code of Ethics was adopted in June of 1995 to publicly articulate the beliefs and values that ALA is dedicated to preserving and practicing. The Code of Ethics came out of recognition for the need to ethically reconcile the power inherent in the library as a primary collector and disseminator of information. The general statements included in the Code of Ethics focus primarily on the intention to “uphold the principle of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.” Also, the Code of Ethics strongly denounces the “advancement of private interests” and distinguishes “between personaLfconvictions and professional duties.”

Tucked within these general statements regarding the library as an institution lies the heart of the library’s purpose. At the most fundamental level, the library, dedicated to the freedom of expression and the preservation of those forms of expression, is a facilitator of education. In 1937, Randolph Adams claimed the librarian is essentially an “administrative official and promoter of adult education” (319), and of course the same holds true today. Similar to Adams’ sentiments, B. Lee Cooper states, in his forward to Frank Hoffman’s Popular Culture & Libraries , that “dedication to the expansion of intellectual horizons, rather than the perpetuation of any single orthodoxy is the cornerstone of librananship” (viii). Cooper also states that librarians are champions of “accumulating, organizing preserving and circulating all forms of information and making it available to all patrons” (viii).

Whether providing popular materials for a public library or specific volumes for research purposes in an academic library, the library holds the key to understanding cultures of the past, present and future. As Jennifer Tebbe mentions, “what a society writes, publishes and reads is a guide to its culture” (259). The holdings in a library are essentially a record of culture. When those holdings are incomplete, the library consequently presents an incomplete view of society and through its incompleteness, relegates certain aspects of that culture to the margins. According to the Bill of Rights and the Code of Ethics, we have seen how such deliberate exclusion is undesirable for libraries, but what can be done to help ensure libraries acquire and maintain more complete collections?

Words like “all” and “every” in reference to information and library patrons surely set the library up against seemingly insurmountable odds in an attempt to achieve the philosophical ideals of the library. However, we should not dismiss such ambition as pure idealism and continue upholding the status quo of the library. Instead, we should heed such calls as a challenge to increase the efficiency and scope of the library’s work, and do what we can to get as close to those ideals as possible.

If we understand the primary goal of the library is to provide access to an accurate representation of our society and its many cultures, we can also see that this goal is still unfulfilled by most libraries. Naturally, such a goal will ideally be just out of reach, as cultures are constantly in motion. Attempting to keep up will always leave us one step behind. However, a blind adherence to tradition will leave us forever stationary while society races well out of sight. Valuing the worth of tradition as an example of the remnants of what has been attempted and stood the test of time, we should have no problem building on those conventions that have proven their worth.

Offering up new ways to improve on old methods surely does not advocate the abandonment of library standards, but rather the building off of those standards to advance a more inclusive collection. Such “new” additions that have already proven their currency in some places can be seen in the inclusion of popular materials in the library’s holdings. Marshall Fishwick’s definition of popular as “attempting to find new apparatus to study and understand the world we inhabit and relish” (Hoffman, 2), provides a useful connection between the library and fields of scholarly work that it aims to service.

The academic library has, for the most part, ignored the need to include popular material in its collection. With the exception of the most successful example in the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, few academic libraries have addressed the worth of popular culture materials in helping students and faculty make sense out of contemporary culture. This is not surprising considering the long tradition of marginalization that popular culture has suffered at the hand of “official” or “high” culture (Hoffman, 6). Although popular culture has existed since culture in general has been possible, there is little trace of its many manifestations because it was deemed unworthy of recording in relation to elite culture.

Only within the last thirty years has popular culture been deemed worthy of separate academic scholarship. Ray Browne, in his essay claiming popular culture as the new humanities suggests that ignoring popular culture as a key element of the humanities is akin to academics who turn off their “listening button” and ignore the possible dimensions that exploring popular culture can add to any work in the humanities. To remedy this, he asks “those interested in studying and understanding American life and culture in its broadest and richest sense, to become broader viewed, more open minded, and less exclusive” (7). Similarly, Russel Nye considers the “study of popular culture, done seriously and with proper purpose and methodology, can open up new areas of evidence which can contribute greatly to what, we know about the attitudes, ideas and values of a society at a given place or time; in so doing, we find a broader and deeper understanding of society” (Browne, 5). Is this not the goal of scholarship within the humanities in general? To clarify the quest for a more complete vision of culture, we can turn to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s articulation of true knowledge:

The literature of the poor, the feelings OF A CHILD, THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE STREET, 'THE MEANING OF HOUSEHOLD LIFE, ARE THE TOPICS OF THE TIME. IT IS A GREAT STRIDE...OF NEW VIGOR WHEN THE EXTREMITIES ARE MADE ACTIVE; WHEN THE CURRENTS OF WARM LIFE RUN INTO THE HANDS AND TFfE FEET. I ASK NOT FOR THE GREAT, THE REMOTE, THE ROMANTIC*, WHAT IS doing in Italy or Arabia; what is Greek art or Provencal Ministry. I embrace

THE COMMON. I EXPLORE AND SIT AT THE FEET OF THE FAMILIAR, THE LOW. GlVE ME INSIGHT INTO TODAY AND YOU MAY HAVE THE ANTIQUE AND FUTURE WORLDS.

(quoted in Moran, 7)

To heed the advice of Emerson and scholars of popular culture ultimately demands that a body of material is available for research. Imagine the chemistry professor attempting to put together ground-breaking research without access to a lab or necessary materials. Or picture the historian attempting to make sense of the past without the use of archives. So too, is the scholar who chooses to present a more complete picture of his or her subject by incorporating popular materials working from a disadvantaged position without the use of popular material in the library.

In addition to the outmoded tradition of privileging elite forms of culture at the expense of popular culture as one reason for the absence of popular materials in the library, there are other obstacles to establishing popular culture collections. One of the limitations, suggests Barbara Moran, is the fallacy of limited collection development potential. Because libraries have limited access to human and financial resources, Moran says there is a need to acquire the “best” materials for the least amount of money. Unfortunately, the ambiguity of the word “best” often leads to the perpetuation of acquiring elite materials; a phenomenon Wayne Wiegand calls “aesthetic conservatism” (Moran, 4). In reality, as we will see, the diversification of collections to include popular culture can be managed without extensive costs being incurred by the library, but first, let us turn our attention to where to begin the diversification process.

Even if we agree that popular materials deserve to be collected and made available to patrons in an academic library, where do we begin the process? By definition, popular culture encompasses “aspects of the world we inhabit; the way of life we inherit, practice and pass on to our descendents; and what we do while we are awake, the dreams we dream while asleep” (Browne, 1). While this definition certainly leaves the door open for acquiring all sorts of material in the name of popular culture, it certainly does the traditional library little good in naiTowing down what it should directs its attention toward in trying to establish a holding of popular material. For more direction in this project, we can return to Tebbe’s statement that all “a society writes, publishes and reads is a guide to its culture” (259). At first it may seem to be a rather conservative statement to suggest that a library simply focus on the printed word in an effort to expand its scope to include popular materials. However, even with the library’s focused attention on the printed word as its main source for collection development, there is still much work to be done before the achievement of this goal will be realized.

Outside the realm of books, popular magazines, scholarly journals, reference materials and an infinite number of databases, there exists printed material that has yet to be universally recognized as worthy of library attention. Alternative literature, if incorporated into the library seeking to expand its scope, will help fill in the gaps of cultural representation left empty by focusing collection attention primarily on elite or “accepted” literature. But even the phrase “alternative literature” is fraught with ambiguity, and could leave the well-intentioned librarian without much direction in her or his efforts.

Chris Atton suggests that although a homogenous definition of alternative literature would be impossible, there are few characteristics that serve to demarcate what alternative literature encompasses. For Atton (as well as for our purposes here) alternative literature’s primary characteristic is a “critique of mainstream themes and perspectives that provide thoroughgoing analyses of the media’s representation of business & government interests” (15). He also adds that in addition to proposing alternative values to be put in place of those espoused by the mainstream, alternative literature simply screams for social change. Whether this scream is manifest in the erudite pages of Z Magazine or within the irreverent pages of Public Enema, as well in a box in a closet until the time came to unearth them? If zines are as ephemeral as we say they are, why do they deserve a place in the library? To begin to answer those questions, I ask you to imagine doing historiographic work on the social revolution of the 1960’s without access to such print capital as the Berkeley Barb or the Village Voice. How complete would an analysis of the times be without the crucial dissenting voices that were amplified in the pages of underground newspapers and magazines? In hindsight, we can see how crucial it is that these works be preserved. However, Carlos Hagen reminds us that librarians during the 1960’s and 1970’s met the independent press with relative indifference. “American librarianship has an admirable record of supporting freedom of expression and fighting censorship,” states Hagen, “(and) one would have expected that librarians would have recognized the importance of the new publications and avidly supported them”(15). Unfortunately, today there are few academic libraries that could claim a substantial collection of the underground press of the 1960’s, and we can learn some valuable lessons from the mistakes made by past librarians.

Chris Makepeace addresses another concern of voiced by librarians that deals with the collection of ephemeral material. As we have seen, the library has traditionally focused its collection efforts on those materials that are established as credible. We have also seen how this conservative approach results in overlooking material that, while residing in the margins of mainstream society, may provide a perspective that is available nowhere else. Makepeace asks, “who is to say that what is printed today and discarded tomorrow by the majority of people will not fulfill some important role in future historical research?” (2). Thus, the need to preserve and collect zines in libraries is even more crucial at a time when media ownership has become increasingly concentrated. The homogenization of American culture brought on, in part, by this increased concentration of media ownership does not go unchallenged, and it is up to librarians to ensure that those dissenting voices are not silenced forever. Julie Herrada, referring to the Labadie Collection of Social Protest Literature at the University of Michigan, confirms this need in saying, “our collections will provide an understanding for future generations of how our society has challenged and transformed the walls of censorship and control of information by the mainstream media...and it is our responsibility to understand it well enough to disseminate it” (81).

Up to this point, it would seem that the justification for preserving zines rests on the assumption that zines’ existence in the fringes of mainstream American culture is reason enough to collect them. While this is adequate justification for many librarians, others may not be so easily swayed. To those people, Laila Mileticvejsovic reconfirms zines’ status as creations of popular culture “because they reflect the attitudes and values of the masses” (Chepesiuk 69). She says they “can tell us a lot about slang and language in our society, so they are as valuable a special collection as anything a library can collect” (Chepesiuk, 69). Also, we can see zines as virtually any other historical artifact that is capable of providing insight into the past. Kathryn DeGraff considers “zines to be a form of primary source material as important for the study of the history of today’s mass culture as letters, diaries and scrapbooks” (Chepesiuk, 70). All of which have been given considerable attention from archivists and librarians.

As we can see, the dedication of the library to the notion of preserving and making accessible all forms of expression is definitely in congruence with the collection of zines as one of those many forms of expression. Unfortunately, the realistic financial and human resource limits on the library often relegate the work of libraries to maintaining the status quo, and the idea of actually preserving the ideals presented in the Library Bill.of Rights and Code of Ethics often seem far out of reach. Surely most librarians, if given an unlimited budget and numerous helping hands, would set to working on diversifying the library’s holdings to include a variety of different resources, including zines.

Assuming these limitations are real, I would still contend that incorporating zines into the academic library would not be the daunting task it initially seems to be. The librarian with little or no experience with zines need only visit a local coffee shop, record store or independent bookstore to find locally produced zines. Many zines review other zines within their pages, and they often include letters written to the editor or individual writers. With those two resources alone, a person can pick up one zine and become instantly connected to ten or more other zines. With this in mind, Chris Dodge recommends librarians interested in making zines a part of their collections should adopt the “think globally, collect locally” mindset of zine acquisition (29). The informal communication network of zines allows the librarian to start with a small local collection that has the potential to grow exponentially with very little effort. Because zines are a form of communication that attempts to exist outside a commercial market, they often only cost a dollar or two per copy to cover printing and postage costs. Some zine editors even distribute their zines for free or in exchange for stamps.

A librarian that is able to navigate the informal communication networks of the zine world could easily enhance the acquisition of zines. By utilizing zines that focus their attention on reviewing other zines (such as the MSRRT Newsletter or Zine Guide , or Zine World), as well as developing relationships with distributors and editor, the librarian could establish a self-sustaining flow of zines into the libraries. If zine writers were made aware of how they would benefit from the preservation of the zines in libraries, most would assuredly be interested in sending their zines to libraries for free. Recognizing the probable resistance to the institutionalization of zines by publishers, Herrada urges us that “as librarians with a vision, we must convince zine publishers not only of the importance of preserving and making accessible of their work as a cultural or educational tool, but also that we won’t as (Andy “Sunfrog”) Smith says “give their name to ‘the cops” (80). " *

There is a slow recognition by zine publishers that the world of zines could benefit from a close relationship with libraries. Just as libraries could fill in the gaps of their collections by including zines, zine publishers could increase the readership of their zines exponentially with little cost to them. Speaking to other zine writers regarding the possibility of working with libraries and archives, Andy “Sunfrog” Smith states, “while many publishers are also avid zine collectors, we could hardly hope to compile the depth and divergence that an aggressive archivist may cull and pull together. We should lend our support to the archives that keep our voices from the political wilderness alive by visiting them and sending our zines their way” (Herrada, 83).

Assuming the acquisition of zines would actually represent the easiest aspect of incorporating zines into the library, we can learn from the work of a few other libraries how deal with the more difficult work of how to make sense out of a diverse collection of zines. The overwhelming diversity of zines would suggest cataloging them would be a nightmare. However, Alison Scott, director of the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University, suggests that if a library is serious about developing and making accessible a collection of zines, the tools are already available to the librarian to help impose some coherence on a collection of zines. When Billie Aul and the New York State Library offered to house the Factsheet Five collection of over 10,000 zines, they chose not to approach them as thousands of individual serials. Instead, “bibliographic access (is provided) only to the collection as a whole-access to particular items in the collection would be provided by finding aids, which are more like broadindexes or tables of contents than like cataloging” (82). Obviously different libraries will have access to different resources, which is why a zine collection should be managed creatively and critically according to the needs of the community that it serves. Some public librarians advocate the incorporation of zines into the periodical collections. Other libraries, such as the Popular Culture Library in Bowling Green, have incorporated zines into their special collection holdings and are providing access to the zines just as it has for other ephemeral material.

Some advocate preserving zines as full-color microfiche and providing access to them as we would other archival materials. Similar suggestions have been made to render zines electronically immortal through the use of computers. While both are excellent ideas for the long-term preservation of zines, we should not ignore the physical properties of zines, as they are as much a part of what zines are as the content is. Zines, with their xeroxed pages, silk-screened covers* homemade binding or handwritten text, are portable constructions of culture that can talk back either through the text or a paper cut on the hand of the reader. As such, zines are fragile. The long-term goal of preserving zines in fiche format or digitally will serve well long after the physical object has deteriorated, but the first order of business to make efforts to locate and preserve as many zines as possible.

The library has a rich tradition of conservatism that is constantly being challenged. Thirty years ago, the idea that popular culture artifacts should be collected and preserved was scoffed at by many, but today the Popular Culture Library in Bowling Green, is lauded as an exemplary model of how to practice librarianship. Instead of simply citing the work of the Popular Culture Library as an exceptional model, many libraries are beginning to take part in establishing their own popular culture collections. However, the process has been understandably slow-going. The acquisition of more alternative literature titles can help bridge the gap between the traditional notion of a library that focuses primarily on the printed word and the more unconventional idea of the work of libraries that we see in the Popular Culture Library. Included in the realm of alternative literature are the independently produced zines that have exploded in numbers during the last twenty years.

Zines are only the most recent form of communication that provides voice to those without access to mainstream outlets. They are the latest on the scene, but have undoubtedly proven their staying power after almost a century of publishing and the most recent turn toward the internet. Zine publishers have long since known about the democratizing potential of self-publishing. Chris Dodge suggests that zines are “a celebration, not only of the much vaunted freedom to read, but of the freedom to publish” (30). Fredric Wertham offers some closing thoughts when he asks, “can we afford to ignore completely an era of communication like fanzines? Should we not try to bridge the gap between gifted amateurs and institutionalized intellectuals?” (132). If we are to uphold the principles of the library as an administrator of all forms of information, we cannot deny zines a position within its walls.

This article by Jason Kucsma originally appeared in issue #3 of his publication Praxis.