Library Research Scholars Spring 2025
Zines, self-published creative works have a rich history as a medium that allows for radical self-expression and creativity. Since the early 1990s, there has been an explosion in scholarly interest in zines and many academic institutions have begun to integrate them into their curriculum, programming, and resources for students and faculty. With this sustained scholarly interest in zines (1: “163 peer-reviewed articles published between 1990 and 2018” studied zines and show that “scholarly interest in zines has increased steadily and by 1,700% over 28 years”), it is vital that Binghamton University be a part of the conversation on zines.
My focus from the beginning of this project has been to evaluate the current scholarly literature on zines as well as engage with current zine-makers on campus to develop potential ways for the Binghamton University Libraries to better support zine-makers on campus as well as promote their use in classes and encourage their use through programming. During the first half of this semester-long project, I primarily focused on reading zine scholarship and meeting with professors using zines, with the conclusion being my first zine workshop and the creation of an annotated bibliography of selected literature on zines. In the second half, I worked to put what I learned into practice and created a proposal for a zine library. This, in addition to developing a website for the project and working with the Makerlab, allowed me to put my research into the community and share my findings with others.
1: Hays, Anne. “A Citation Analysis about Scholarship on Zines.” Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication8, no. 1 (July 23, 2020), p. 1