A university librarian explains why her zine collection's catalog is open access / Boing Boing

"Since 2010, I have been searching for a way to make the zine catalog searchable to the OCAD U community and the general public. Making the catalog openly available to the general public was one of the primary goals in selecting the best search tool for the collection, since so much of the content in the collection was donated by the general public. Additionally, locking the catalog behind a user login went against the ethos of zines and zine culture: to be open, accessible, and existing outside of the regular boundaries of institutions. When our Visual Resources Department selected Artstor’s Shared Shelf as the primary tool for our institutional image database, the Learning Zone staff immediately saw the benefits of using this system, particularly the ability to publish publicly on Shared Shelf Commons, for sharing the catalog of the collection.

The OCAD U Library’s Visual Resources department has been instrumental in making this project a reality. Since 2011, long before we had a system selected, they have been scanning the covers of zines in our collection in preparation for the time that the catalog would go live. At present, we have almost 2200 zines cataloged, so this has been no small feat. In the past year, they have worked with the Learning Zone staff in editing and expanding our cataloging metadata to map onto Shared Shelf standards, as well as providing us with hands-on training in using the administrator functions and cataloging back end of the system."