Should we archive punk zines? It is already happening, but it is worth having a conversation about what we want and don’t want. The question is not just how do we archive, but also why or why not?
If we know why we are archiving, we can better decide how to do so and how not to do so.
Does archiving mean just posting stuff online, 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.
Punk Pedagogy 