This is what I'll be doing this weekend instead of cataloging zines. Digital Archivist Martha Tenney and I are presenting at the Radical Archives conference at NYU on 4/11/14 at 11:05am.
Barnard Zine Library: Privileging Creators
Barnard Zine Library policies and procedures are intended to be responsive to and reflective of zine community ethos. Honoring a zine maker's request to remove her zine from one's collection can provoke ethical fisticuffs in a zine librarian/librarian zinester's heart. To whom is the feminist archivist of living authors' materials more responsible, the authors themselves or researchers from the future? And to distant researchers? If we want the voices represented in the Barnard Zine Library--default female, as often as not queer, often young, usually radical, women of color emphasized, etc.--to be part of the archival narrative of the late 20th/early 21st century is it a mistake to privilege the zines' creators wishes? As Kate Eichhorn posits in The Archival Turn in Feminism can "…item-level cataloging of marginal materials holds more potential for subversion than simply digitizing the same materials." even for remote users of our collection? This paper will explore how, influenced by our location in an institution peopled by faculty and scholars that integrate intersectional feminisms into their lives and work, it is ultimately reasonable to have a creator-centric philosophy inform our decision-making.