All You Anarchist Fuckers...

Chelsea from the Zine Archive Project at the Long Haul in Berkeley writes: "Please post (us) on your site and list us as a zine archive..." also "Can you clue us in to where all the zinesters go on the internet? Especially ones that might live in the SF bay area? Specifically, people who are into anarchist/ political zines?" and "We need help setting up an online catalog with Drupal and the Long Haul website (needs to) get spruced up."

Zine Archive Project Orientation Tuesday September 13 6pm

The Long Haul Zine Archive Catalog Project

Posted on July 17, 2011 by thelonghaul

About the Long Haul Zine Archive

By our calculations, the Long Haul has about 15,000 (!) zines in its archive. They are kept in magazine boxes on shelves lining one of the walls of our space. They are loosely organized alphabetically.

About the Catalog Project

Our goal with the catalog project is to create a searchable catalog with a record for each zine. Records will include information like title, author/ publisher, date, location, list of subjects, and volume/issue number. Ideally this catalog will help to make our zines accessible to interested parties that might include: anarchists, zinesters, enthusiasts, independent media, and beyond.

We’re also attempting to reorganize our zines by subject, because we want to prioritize making our archive browsable, and we figure that it might be harder to come across something you like when they’re organized alphabetically. We realize that we can’t effectively capture what many zines are about with one subject heading, but we can enter multiple subjects for each zine in the catalog which hopefully will make up for it. The list of subject headings we use for organizing our zines is a modified version of the Anchor Zine Archive’s (Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada) box category subjects, and is of course up for debate and input.

How you can plug in

The bulk of the work of this project involves looking through every zine in our collection, deciding what subject to put each zine in, and creating records for each zine in our catalog, which currently takes the form of a spreadsheet in google docs. Additionally, we have been trying to figure out the best way to put the catalog online. So far, we’re thinking using Drupal might be the best idea, but that’s as far as we’ve gotten.
We try to meet at the Long Haul every Tuesday 6-8pm to work on the Zine Archive. If you want to come another time, email longhaulzinearchive@riseup.net to set up a time. Once you learn our process, you can come any time the Long Haul is open to work on it!

Any comments, questions, or ideas please email to longhaulzinearchive@riseup.net as well.

Love, Rage, and DIY publishing!