Establish a Library Zine Collection and contribute to linked open data online zine catalog

Rhonda Kauffman
November 18, 2015

Zines are often produced by members of marginalized communities and in order to best serve our community and respectfully engage with and represent those communities, I suggest adding a zine collection to the MIT Libraries. Zines provide unique primary resource materials and are readily available via distributors, bookstores; there is even a zine pavilion at ALA!

There currently exists a group of zine librarians and a further subgroup of zine librarians, developers, metadata-ists, and archivists (full disclosure, I am a part of these groups) that are working to create a shared library catalog for zines from libraries with disparate and sometimes nonexistent metadata schemas. The shared catalog uses the linked open data model and by contributing to the catalog, MIT would be at the forefront of current trends in sharing and creating open data for use and reuse.

Why do you care about library spaces, collections, and services?: 

I feel the library collections should be as diverse as the community it serves and there are a lot of voices that are not represented in more traditional forms of publication.

Library collections (physical and digital)