Zines for Teaching: A Survey of Pedagogy and Implications for Academic Librarians

Abstract

Zines have begun to gain a place in higher education as pedagogical tools studied or made by students, and many academic libraries maintain zine collections. The library literature reveals little about how nonlibrarian faculty use zines in their classrooms. This paper describes the results of a survey of faculty from a range of academic disciplines and professions who teach with zines and other booklet forms. Survey results reveal the extent to which faculty zine pedagogies include collaboration with librarians and use of library collections. Faculty describe instructional activities and attitudes that many library professionals, including reference and instruction librarians, directors or deans, catalogers, acquisition and special collections librarians, and archivists, may find useful. Zines, Chapbooks, and Pamphlets Zines are defined as do-it-yourself publications. Those who create them are often called zinesters. Zine content varies, and Stephen Duncombe's taxonomy of zines is useful for understanding the range of subject matter: there are fanzines, political zines, personal zines (sometimes referred to as perzines), identity zines, religious zines, vocational zines, and zines about health, sex, travel, comics, literature, and art. 2 What distinguishes zines in general is the personal nature of the content, whether the subject matter be diaristic or political. Zines, chapbooks, and pamphlets share the booklet form. Publishers manufacture paperback books with a form of bookbinding called perfect binding, in which their pages are glued together to form a spine. Booklets are not perfectly bound but are saddle stitched, a printer's term for stapled or wire stitched, or saddle sewn, bound with a needle and thread or string. A "foldy" zine consist of several pages folded together without any binding. Booklets tend to be produced in small runs, sometimes in numbered editions. The most conservative definition of a zine is a self-published, black-and-white photocopied booklet. The number of copies is usually determined by the resources available. Historically, zines have been made by hand-the pages typed, drawn, written, collaged, glued, and taped-and then reproduced on a photocopier. Today, most zines are still made by hand but may be scanned and printed at home. Some zinesters now make zines via desktop publishing, yet many continue to work in analog environments. Other zinesters work in both digital and analog environments. Pre-Internet, people exchanged zines via the postal service. More recently, zinesters sell or trade them in person at zine fairs or sell them through "distros" (distributors) in stores or online. The higher the production cost, the higher the sale price. The rise of art and design zines, with features such as silk screen and letterpress printing, has led to an acceptance of some zines as moderately priced artist's multiples. Defined as an artwork produced in an edition of two or more, multiples challenge the definition of art as a unique creation. 3 Such zines are usually sold at fairs of artist...

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