Accessibility and Archives: Preserving Community Stories - Collective Cataloguing at the Glasgow Zine Library
This blog is from Kate Guariento and Nic Munogee, who are the archives staff at the Glasgow Zine Library. They look after the Library's growing collection of zines and manage the delivery of Glasgow Zine Library's inclusive cataloguing project, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund. If you aren’t sure what zines are, this series has previously included a post about a zine, and the GZL has a helpful FAQ page. Their approach challenges us to reflect on how our catalogue descriptions might be different if we included disabled people in the process.
Glasgow Zine Library is a self-publishing library, archive and community space in Govanhill, Glasgow. We have a collection of around 4000 zines, spanning topics as broad as gender, sexuality, direct action and activism, to popular culture, local interest, photography, art, nature and more. Since 2022, with funding from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, we have been running a programme of workshops and events focused on community cataloguing and inclusive archival description, with the aim of improving access to and awareness of our ever-growing collection.
A zine (pronounced 'zeen') is most commonly a handmade publication often made in small circulations, printed and bound using various methods and sizes. The topics are on absolutely anything you can imagine. As zines are made and circulated outside of mainstream publishing channels, they have historically been a platform for marginalised people to engage, express their ideas, document experiences and create alternative DIY methods of making, sharing, and community building. Preserving zines and zine culture is essential work in ensuring these perspectives and histories are not lost.
Zines in Glasgow Zine Library’s public-facing collection. The zines are displayed in OSB wood shelving.
As Glasgow Zine Library has evolved and expanded, so too has our collection of zines and zine ephemera. When GZL first opened in 2018 in the Gorbals, the collection stood at around 350 zines – now, in its new location in Govanhill, GZL’s ever-growing zine collection stands at around 4000. The aim of our ‘Preserving Community Stories’ project, which comes to an end this month, has been to create a full catalogue of GZL’s holdings, in order to better preserve and provide access to this unique and invaluable collection.
As an organisation whose values are rooted in the ethos and practice of DIY and community empowerment, and in recognition of the ways in which marginalised communities are often described and written about by people who do not share their experiences and identities, it felt natural and necessary that GZL’s catalogue should be created in collaboration with the communities that the zines in our collection represent. To do so, we set up regular community cataloguing sessions and hosted community cataloguing workshops focused on important categories in our collection, such as ‘Cataloguing Queer Zines’, ‘Cataloguing POC-Centred Zines’, and ‘Cataloguing Disability Zines’. The majority of these workshops were for closed groups – i.e. the ‘Cataloguing Queer Zines’ workshop was open to folks who identify as queer – in order to make sure that we heard from the people who have most often been spoken for in traditional archival description, and to ensure as far as possible that the people in attendance felt as comfortable as possible to provide their perspectives.
A group of seven people attend a cataloguing workshop at Glasgow Zine Library. They are sitting around a table and looking at zines.
At our community cataloguing workshops, we used the collections as a springboard to have discussions about language, inclusion, and the potential for power and harm that is bound up with the process of naming, categorising, and describing. An important theme which we discussed at the ‘Cataloguing Disability Zines’ workshop, and was touched on in various ways at many of the community cataloguing workshops, was the strangeness of categorising zines which were themselves reflections on the weirdness, power and sometimes violence of being put into categories. In the case of zines about disability, the theme of naming and categorisation is often especially important, in relation to the process of being diagnosed. We discussed how to ensure that our zines were discoverable, without having the terminology of diagnosis as the only avenue to finding the collection.
It was wonderful to be able to discuss these important and challenging topics with our community, and to open up our cataloguing processes to debate and scrutiny. So often, cataloguing is seen as a solitary pursuit, or forced to be so because of constraints on budgets and resources. It has been a privilege to be able to come together with zines, zine makers, readers, and library users to work on making our collection more accessible and collaborate on our new catalogue.
Our new catalogue is a work-in-progress, and can be accessed here: https://gzlarchive.omeka.net. A big thank you to our cataloguing volunteers and community cataloguing workshop participants, and to the National Lottery Heritage Fund, for helping us catalogue and preserve our collection.
Contributions to this series are welcomed, particularly if you have experience of working with disabled people. If you are interested in contributing to a similar post, in the first instance contact diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk.