#aslspotlight - The Forgotten Zine Archive - Zinesters are doin' it for themselves



Tom Maher & Mick O’Dwyer, Zine Librarians 
The Forgotten Zine Archive

Libraries, the material they catalogue and the audiences they seek to empower come in all shapes and sizes and the case of the Forgotten Zine Archive serves to remind us of this.

To the uninitiated a Zine (as in FanZINE or MagaZINE) is an amateur home made publication, generally on a topic close to the maker's heart. Though the roots of the format can arguably be traced back to Benjamin Franklin's early amateur publications the zine came into its own with the growth of alternative music fan publications through the 1980's and 1990's. By the early 2000's with easy access to online communities the zine as an outlet for free expression began to fade.        
       
The Forgotten Zine Archive began life as the collection of Irish Zine enthusiast Ciaran Walsh, migrating from a warehouse in North Strand to its current home in Seomra Spraoi.  It has grown to a collection of over 1, 200 zines representing the voices of the alternative publishing movement in Ireland.

Mick O' Dwyer and Tom Maher, current curators of the collection and zine librarians will share the story of the Forgotten Zine Archive and illustrate its evolution from collection to collaborative enterprise. The archive has become an example of what an alternative library can be and the extent to which a library is more than just a physical collection as the zine archive has reached out to become a maker space, a source of education on the alternative press and a repository of this unique and individual publication format.
 
Mick and Tom's case study will take us deep into the heart of zineland sharing their love of all things zine, they even promise to give us some hands on zine action with a pop up mini zine archive.

Prepare for an all out zine love fest!  


Posted by