Punk is not dead.
But it exists in a world of simultaneous lives right now, with the past often as easily accessed as the present. I can remember how important it was to encounter the past of punk rock, discovering bands like Bad Brains or Crass, and how they continued to influence the present. But I also know that this material was often hard to find. Now, one can attend a live concert and then go home and watch footage from a gig 20 years ago, read a zine from 30 years ago, or discover new music that inspired an earlier generation. Punk rock’s past has never been more present.
Punk music, zines, posters, oral history, ephemera, and concerts are being archived online, in books, in documentary film, and in physical archives that are private and public.
But not all of this actually documents what punk is and was. Some of the archives are temporary, here one day and gone the next. Others forget key parts of punk culture even as they document the past. And there are many features of community that just don’t translate well to an archive.
Punks learn by doing and much of the archiving of punk follows this form.
What sorts of topics are raised by archiving punk? Why does one need to think about how archives function? Whose stories are included? Whose are forgotten?
Punk archives are teaching people about the past but they are also forgetting parts of the past.
Is punk just about the music? Is archiving something that can distort what punk is? Whose version of punk rock is remembered? What if the same people are always the ones interviewed?
How are archives being built and for whom do they exist? What do these archives mean for punks in the present?
Archiving is a form of public pedagogy because it involves teaching individuals what punk is and how it will be remembered and because it involves making decisions about what is included and left out.
What does it mean for someone’s youthful contributions to punk culture to suddenly become available online, globally, perhaps without their knowledge or permission?
Punk Planet, Slug and Lettuce, Maximum Rocknroll, and HeartattaCk were all crucial zines, each one addressing different elements of punk culture in the 1990s. What would it mean if only one of them were archived?
This page is a conversation about creating digital archives of zines and is part of ever-expanding discussions in which we think more about archiving punk rock.
There are so many subjects to think about when digitizing punk zines, including whether or not public archives should exist, how they might be organized, what ethical matters need to be considered, and so on. The goal of this page is to reflect on these complicated questions and to further inform the conversations we are already having about how punk is archived online and offline. This was a collaborative effort undertaken by students at UBC. Some of my favourites come from those students who explored the value of an archive by discussing issues of the zine HeartattaCk.
Table of Contents
An Inventory of Existing Archives
Debates About Archiving
Principles
Against Archives
The Value of an Archive
References
An Inventory of Existing Archives
What do existing zine archives look like and how do they function?
How can we learn from the decisions others have made when developing new zine archives online?
How are punk zines being archived? How do these archives handle copyright? Who can access the archive and does it offer digital access to zines?
The pair of articles below examine the web footprint of several zine archives in order to better understand how they function, how they are organized and designed, and how they serve their audiences.
This examination is divided into community-created archives and formal institutional archives collecting punk culture.
Punk Archives made by Punks
A description of several archives created by those within the punk community
Academic Zine Archives
A description of several archives hosted and managed by universities
Debates About Archiving
In 2015, a group of Zine Librarians developed a Code of Ethics to express “a set of core values that inform and guide our work.” They note that this code is meant to raise the sort of thorny questions that I am raising here, not necessarily resolve them.
This is an approach that I find fruitful and never more so than when we are dealing with complex matters like the question of whether to archive punk ephemera and zines online. I would urge anyone interested to read through their thoughtful document. In what follows, I want to think with these authors and extend the conversation toward public digital zines archives. It is worth keeping in mind what they say about principles:
Guidelines may not apply uniformly to every situation, but include discussion of disputed points. This gives zine librarians and archivists ideas of what has been challenging in the past and how other zine custodians have dealt with those issues. These points can guide conversations with users, institutions, authors, donors, and communities, including other zine librarians and archivists.
A librarian I know once expressed the archival impulse as a desire to collect, gather, and preserve for the future. In a vacuum that sounds entirely welcome, but things are rarely that simple. As the zine librarians note, working with and for a zine community, as well as for the larger public, entails a very particular set of conditions, including recognizing that they have a responsibility to what may be a marginalized community and that their duties extend beyond the act of preserving fragile paper documents.
As professional archivists, their concerns are sometimes different from my own. They address how materials should be acquired as well as what documents belong in a zine archive; how to best balance a desire for public access with the rights of a community to privacy; how zines should be preserved; how permissions and copyright will be understood; and how an archive can be organized. By contrast, I am thinking more about the creation of public digital archives of zines.
Some particular highlights from their code of ethics that I find especially helpful for thinking about public digital archives include the following:
Whenever possible, it is important to give creators the right of refusal if they do not wish their work to be highly visible.
In our experience, reproducing or sharing zines involves not just copyright law and practices, but also zinesters’ inherent right to decide how their work is distributed and how widely, and how it is contextualized. In sum, it is about community, about respect, and about the simple act of being a considerate person and information professional.
Researchers or journalists writing extensively about a particular zine creator or community should get in touch with the relevant people directly, when possible. The zine library/archives holding their works is not a proxy for the people who created them, but librarians/archivists can and should direct researchers towards those creators when they can.
Zine librarians/archivists should make every effort to create environments that are physically and emotionally accessible [ensuring they are guided by] … a safer spaces policy” because “zine libraries should always be sensitive to issues of, among other things, race, class, gender, sexuality, physical disability, and mental/emotional health.
As I read their code of ethics, I find myself wondering about issues they do not explicitly address, largely because they have to do with digitizing zines, rather than just archiving them.
What does it mean to create unauthorized copies of a zine? Is a digital edition an unauthorized copy, if one has not received permission?
Is it acceptable to proceed on the assumption that non-commercial educational exemptions can be used without also securing positive permission to reproduce a zine digitally? Does this respect creators and the punk community?
What should the nature of the permission be in the case of creating digital archives? Does a creator have an ongoing right of refusal in which they can request material be removed should they no longer wish to have material posted publicly? Who has the right to speak for others when obtaining permissions? Can an editor or publisher speak on behalf of contributors?
Can the zine be used as a benchmark for understanding what visibility means in the present? Consider the following statement from the code of ethics: “We should not expose the legal identities of zine creators in cases where those identities are not explicitly noted in the zines themselves.” Surely more context is needed than just the zine itself, no? Why would one’s preferences from 30 years ago, in a pre-Internet underground subculture, still be enforced in the present as an indication of the desire to be identified?
Where permission is not possible, should digital copies be altered in order to obscure legal identities?
Should we even archive punk zines? It is already happening, but it is worth having a conversation about what we want and don’t want.
Does archiving online mean just posting stuff in ways that are available for all?
“Ask a punk” is a tagline from posters that we use because we don’t always want prying eyes. What would that same logic look like for an online archive, for example?
What does one need to consider when creating an archive? How are digital and offline archives different? Who should decide what material is made public? Who should give permission to archive zines publicly, especially in instances where copyright was never really considered or it was actively resisted?
What are some of the implications of digitizing and archiving zines online when they were originally published in a pre-internet age and shared largely only within an underground community?
The articles below introduce a number of important considerations for public and private archiving, including a number of examples of how zines are being archived and what it means that these digital archives are already disappearing just as readily as the original paper zines that they hope to archive.
Why Zines Matter, Part 1
Zines are the institutions of punk rock
Why Zines Matter, Part 2
Zines are intimate and personal
Principles
Reflecting on what is working and not working in existing archives and archival practices, here is an initial attempt to articulate some possible principles regarding the digitization of zines.
1. There are no principles that will apply in every instance. Each archive is different. Each zine is different. Different aims and goals for an archive will necessitate different principles and different challenges. Principles are not prescriptions.
2. Just because every instance is different from any other instance, this does not mean that one gets to pick and choose principles based on convenience. Principles are an attempt to think about our collective social responsibility to one another and to punk. How one best does that cannot be determined by these principles.
3. Being responsible to others means recognizing that archives can harm individuals and the community and that some may be more vulnerable to harm than others.
4. Work with creators to create archives. Encourage collaboration with creators in the design and creation of digital archives. Digitization must be done on the basis of a social license from those within the punk community. It is not done for someone.
5. Develop effective methods of digitization that reflect the preferences of the original creator, including how to best view and host materials and if downloading is desired. Identify the creator with as much or as little detail as they prefer.
6. Secure copyright permissions. At the very least authors/editors/creators should have the right to decide if material goes online and in what ways. If there are multiple creators or contributors, develop clear and identified frameworks for establishing priority: eg. if one of two creators declines to give permission, then permission has not been granted.
7. Do not identify creators and users with legal names unless there is a compelling reason to do so or is preferred by those named publicly.
8. Develop an orphan policy that applies to documents where no permission can be secured despite substantial efforts. This could apply to creators or contributors. Where copyright cannot be secured – such as in the case where permission from a creator is secured but perhaps not from a contributor – eliminate identifying information (by editing a PDF) where necessary.
9. Establish an ongoing right of refusal that enables a creator to rescind permission. A parallel right to remove content from public view for the archive creator should also exist.
10. Decide if digital resources will be searchable as documents or not.
11. Develop user experience strategies to ensure that archives and materials can be accessed as desired. This means thinking about how to best organize an archive and present it to the public.
12. Develop and publish details regarding policies on permissions, permissions granted, and a policy that guides the collection and development of the archive.
13. Work with the community to create archives. The best existing archives are clearly attached to a place within punk, a historical moment, or a stylistic pocket of punk culture. Archives should be attached to places, people, and cultural traditions within the community.
14. Place archives in context. Zines responded to a particular set of realities and belong to a time and place in the subculture and in the wider world. By informing present users of that context, these documents become more meaningful. This could include interviews with those who created the zine, for example.
15. Enable users to participate. Archives should be lively places rather than collections of dead documents.
16. Encourage users to become creators by making the collection of materials an opportunity to develop capacity to create new expressions of community and new connections.
Against Archives
There is a case to be made against archiving HeartattaCk or any other zine. This involves thinking about thew differences between a zine’s original purpose and effects and what an archive might do.
As we have explored, there are obvious complications regarding permissions and community consent when creating digital zine archives. I am interested to explore some other equally intractable problems with archiving, beyond the potential harm that might come from making public documents that belonged to an underground culture.
Kathleen Hanna captures this sense of the complications that come with making underground materials public on the internet when she spoke about why she donated material to the Fales Library at NYU:
It’s like people who make paper fanzines in 2010 are making a specific choice to reach a smaller audience than maybe a blog could, it’s an artistic decision. One that has to do with having a tactile object that exists in the real world and can be physically passed from person to person. Choosing an archive that has an intended audience and isn’t for everyone is a similar choice to me. Also, since most of the stuff I donated was created before the internet, I would prefer it be viewed physically and in context. If it was open to everyone little bits of it would inevitably end up on the internet, and I don’t really want rough drafts of shit I wrote twenty years ago popping up online ahistorical style.
But there is more to consider. How does an archive affect a community in the present? Some might want to document a moment in time with an archive to capture the nature of punk culture, particularly for those who lived it. A digital archive can share that important moment with the world. But what if these representations of punk culture, these zines, the debates and ideas they contain, start to define punk culture in the present? Isn’t punk something that every generation should be defining for itself and in its own unique context? What it archives might start to mandate what punk is.
What is a zine meant to do? How does it knit together a community? Isn’t this capacity to carry a culture and create a sense of community lost when it is treated like a document that can be archived and published online?
Is a zine just words on paper? Does it matter if a zine is paper or digital? Why is the interactive experience of zines important and how is that experience lost on the internet?
There may be good reasons not to archive zines and the articles below are a contribution to that conversation.
Lost in Translation
Can the tangible nature of zines be maintained in digital archives? Should it be?
The Value of an Archive
In this section, we return to individual issues of HeartattaCk and reflect on why it is worth making these zines available in the present.
Let’s be honest. Who knows what the value of an archive might be? Is this just an exercise in nostalgia for individuals revisiting their youth? Is that even a bad thing? But surely this is not the only thing that an archive might do. What about people who are discovering these zines for the first time? What might HeartattaCk mean to those readers?
Assessing the value of an archive – especially one meant to last – will always be as foolish as trying to predict the future. But that doesn’t mean we can’t reflect on the value of a punk zine archive in the present.
The articles below come from a class on punk culture at UBC in 2018. This is a bit like an experiment. What does reading archived issues of HeartattaCk mean to people who did not grow up in the 90s hardcore scene that HeartattaCk documents?
Some of them identified with punk; some of them were on the punk-rock-spectrum as animal rights advocates, artists, or left-wing thinkers. They all found the ideas and conversations they discovered in HeartattaCk to resonate with them almost 20 years later.
The New Paradigm is Punk
How Punk Zines Provide a Model for Addressing Sexual Assault in North American High Schools
Communication is Power
Understanding the role of dialogue
A Feminist Punk Pedagogy
A Feminist Analysis of HeartattaCk Zines
Storytelling as Punk Pedagogy
How does storytelling function in punk culture?
Is Punk a Youth Culture?
Listening to punks over 30
Ageing in Punk
Community, Alienation, and Growth
Destroying the System?
Punk rhetoric might not be defined by opposition as much as it seems to be
The Value of Learning and the Learning of Values
Comparing Formal Education and Punk Pedagogy
A Punk Rock Education
The view from a teacher-in-training
Articles edited by Stephanie Erickson and George Grinnell. Copyright belongs to the individual authors.
References
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“A Women’s Issue Part 2.” HeartattaCk, #23, August 1999, Goleta CA, pp. 1-88.
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Punk Pedagogy 