BCLA ‘Archive’ Conference
University of Kent
5-8 July 2010
Zines are small, ephemeral & independent print publications that often fall out of the mainstream collective memory, but capture moments in time of individuals and subcultures. The ephemeral materiality of zines presents a challenge for archiving and collecting these moments and memories in traditional institutions. There are a number of collections of zines across the world, in both public institutions and community spaces, preserving the zines to archival standards. These ephemeral objects are out of their everyday use in archive boxes, stored safely for future reference.
This paper moves on from the physical archiving process and considers the recent spate of zine anthologies published in Australia and the United States. It will examine the role of the anthology as an archive of both content and form – zine anthologies commonly reproduce entire zines as visual material, not just text. Like the traditional archive they take the zine into another context – the published book instead of the archival box, but the zine continues to have an everyday use.
This paper will also consider the role of the publisher and anthologist in the archival process, and argue that their narratives, presentation and distribution preserve ideologies of zine culture.
