Organizing the Archive

How should a digital collection of zines be ordered and organized? Alexis Lothian suggests that a zine might not be experienced in quite the same way online as it is in paper form, arguing that this happens “when the primary mode of storage shifts form analogue to digital, from the printer to the pixel.”

Although I agree that thinking about the digital format is important, the turn to the digital is also an opportunity for the zine and the zine archive to generate new effects and reach new readers, extending and transforming the social, historical, and cultural value of zines. Like Kate Eichhorn, I believe the archive can be “effectively wielded” and can matter to readers just as much as the originals do. Yet, this raises questions of how a zine can best be archived and collected online, and who benefits most from a given organizing approach.

Should a zine archive be organized according to zines and their evident topics or structure, or by the authors of zines, reflecting perhaps the guiding thread of a particular perspective? Is this act of organizing innately political? Should organizing principles be obvious or invisible?

This latter question points to what Tom Nesmith has called the social purpose of zine collections and archives. Jessie Lymn explains that, for Nesmith, “documents are created, used and archived with a sense of social purpose, and this social purpose shapes how the records are collected and archived.” The decision to organize an archive is always also a decision not to organize it in another manner. An effective archive ought to acknowledge its decisions and admit that it loses as well as creates knowledge by organizing it in a given fashion.

The question of what one can quickly understand or not understand about a given zine might be the most political feature of an archive. After all, zines carry differing cultural weight and not all zines are, or strive to be, radical or sub- or counter-cultural in nature. Sports zines might be entirely different from feminist zines, which are unique from (but may overlap with) queer zines, which are different from literary zines, which might be nothing like a punk music zine. So, if it is important to think about how the zine is represented in the archive, it is also worthwhile to think about how a zine understands itself and how one might responsibly represent a zine’s own sense of purpose.

What are the guiding principles of the zine itself? How would one categorize this in an archive? To effectively explore these questions, it might be helpful to turn to examples of already existing zine archives to see how they have categorized the zines in their collections.

Grassroots Feminism offers an online collection of zines listed in alphabetical order, accompanied by country of origin, date(s) of publication (if available) and, notably, topics. For example, the zine “Bang Bang” is documented as originating from Switzerland, and the topics related to “Bang Bang” are listed as follows: Zines, Text, Grassroots media in Europe, LGBT and queer issues. Clicking on each of these topics brings one to a database by which all zines in their archive with this topic are connected. It is then possible, by clicking on the topic “LGBT and queer issues” to begin with “Bang Bang” and move on to other zines that explore similar themes and content.  

Are there other ways to categorize? The list appears potentially—and perhaps dangerously—unexhaustive. Lymn notes the complexities of archiving zines, insisting that “the content of zines can be broad, specific and varied and often resists classification” and that this content takes its forms in many ways, including but not limited to the “textual, visual and material.” It strikes me that Lymn is perhaps hinting here towards the social purpose of these zines, the cultural and personal framework from which they have emerged. In many ways, it is hard to pinpoint what this is—as discussed elsewhere, the “social purpose” of feminism might in many ways be linked with veganism, or queerness, environmentalism, or punk ethics. However, if this is not explicitly outlined in the zine, should the curator make the decision about how to cross-categorize? If part of the ethos of punk is a DIY spirit, wouldn’t a punk find something of value in a zine that embraces this spirit but does so without any participation or even interest in punk? Isn’t feminism always a little bit punk rock, even if the reverse is not always true?  How might an archive mobilize categories in ways that capture the unexpected ways that subcultures can think together?

Papercut Zine Library, out of Somerville, MA, takes an interesting half-online half-physical approach. Although their zines are impressively organized within a Google Doc, they do not offer online digital copies of their zines. However, the way they have categorized their zines is worth examining. Like Grassroots, Papercut offers keywords and topics next to the name of the zine. One might question this practice. How many people ought to have input on categories and when and how categories are evident in a given zine? Being selective seems key, but for punk zines like HeartattaCk it appears one has two choices: either use almost no labels at all, or exhaustingly attempt to itemize every concept someone said in a letter, interview, article, or review. Organizing zines by trying to cross-reference content is nothing if not vexed.

How are these keywords chosen? “Why Vegan? Boycott Cruelty!” is listed in the category “food/cookbooks”, the cross-reference is “political, environment/animals”, although I would be tempted to flip the category and the cross-reference to highlight the “why” and “cruelty” in the zine’s title, something I would consider inherently political and philosophical. I draw attention to this admittedly minor curatorial decision not to critique Papercut’s cataloguing, but to demonstrate the fluidity and fragility of categorizing radical, political, and personal zines.

The Queer Zine Archive Project delivers a delightfully complete catalogue. One can browse by the following: Object Types, People, Places, Centuries, Decades, Years, Collections. However, when using these different forms of aggregation, the constructing of a narrative is inevitable. Searching by people (the creator of a zine) proves interesting because all sub-categories dissolve in the face of the author’s potentially diverse and intersecting interests. Could categorizing zines by author, then, be a means of mitigating any kind of inscription of narrative by the archivist? Which modes of archiving are most beneficial to both the creator(s) of a zine and the reader? What are the ethics of sorting by name, moreover? This line of thinking carries significant weight for the authors of these pieces. For instance, not everyone will want a digitally searchable version of something they wrote for an underground punk scene decades ago to suddenly surface. The reasons for this include but are not limited to having words written in a different context held against them by those who have no appreciation for the milieu in which those words were said. Ethical archival dilemmas like this deserve to be taken up on their own separately and demand thoughtful consideration. What I offer here, then, is a reader’s perspective of why it might be worthwhile to be able to sort by author.

Cataloguing the author could be a valuable way for a reader to interact with an archive. Charlotte Cooper, for example, has four zines, seemingly unrelated (beyond their overarching queer themes): Play, Poly, Recycled, and Spice. An author called only Grebo Grebo Grebo has a series instead called Dildos Not Bombs #1 and #2, and many other authors only have one zine archived on the site. Rather than following zines within a specific topic, then, readers are encouraged to explore multiple works by individual authors and the ways in which their interests, ethics, and politics might intersect, contradict, and multiply. Jeremy Brett, one of the co-founders of a zine archive in Texas, sees that the author matters and might indeed be the reason why that author’s work belongs in the QZAP: “At the independent Queer Zine Archive Project…[they’ve] taken a broad view of what makes a zine ‘queer.’ For [their] purposes, if the content of a zine is queer then the zine is queer [and] if the creator identifies as queer, then the zine is also queer.” While this quote may read as an oversimplification of the ways one can categorize a zine, it shows how elastic categorization can be, and thus how difficult the task of the archivist can be. One might be reminded of some of Sam McPheeters’ zines, including “Error” and several strange one-shot art zines. Are these punk zines and do they belong in a punk zine archive? If one follows Brett’s organizational logic, then yes, they do belong in a punk archive, by virtue of being created by McPheeters, the well-known vocalist of Born Against and an active contributor to punk culture. My hunch is that the author category will allow for a more intuitive and organic relationship between reader and creator.

Zine archives will always be a partnership between reader, curator, and creator. Within an archive or collection, one cannot be separated from the other. The narrative of the zine produced by the archive, then, depends not only on the curator of the archive, of the relationship between reader and zine, but also the ways in which it is catalogued and recorded. Because of how an archive is organized “Why Vegan? Boycott Cruelty!” gets turned into a food and cookbook zine, when it might be best described as a political environmental and animal rights zine. I am not trying to suggest that one categorization is better than the other, only to demonstrate that such small decisions help shape the readership of the zine. The social purpose, or meaning, is perhaps in flux, then. If meaning is created in moments of meeting—between reader and creator, two zinesters, zine and author—then this will change necessarily depending on who is meeting whom.

What would if an archive offers a clear articulation of the guiding principles that organize it, posting that so that users understand how the archive is organized?

What if readers could submit their own tags and suggest how things should be catalogued? This option may not be perfect, but would at least be responsive to what readers discover in a given zine.

By Britt MacKenzie-Dale