Zine Party! Collaborating across UT Libraries to Experiment with Methods, Workflows & Tools, Build Awareness of a Collection, and Teach Metadata Literacy

Recent donations of two large collections of zines* to UT’s Fine Arts Library have highlighted the need to improve access to the zines and, at the same time, staff across the Libraries have become more and more interested in exploring new ways to think about describing resources, crowdsourcing, metadata literacy, community engagement, software development, and gamification.

Identifying an opportunity to build awareness of the zine collection, and deepen student and community engagement with the Libraries, we created an event that would allow us to explore these topics, while also doing some PR for the zine collection. The resulting Zine Party! event kicked off with an overview of the world of zines, zine collections and zine librarianship around the country, and a primer on how UT Libraries catalogs zines, then introduced attendees to the xZINECOREx metadata schema and invited them to input catalog metadata using a gamified interface we adapted for local use.

The diverse goals of the various collaborators came together in this event: the event provided an opportunity to ask questions related to public relations, community outreach and engagement, the Libraries’ desire to increase engagement with community software development models, and the incorporation of crowdsourcing into some of our metadata workflows. The profession as a whole has been abuzz with talk of educating the public about what we do as a path to building greater support for the missions of libraries, archives and museums, and we hope we have made a dent in this larger goal as well. Our panel will include representatives from each of the involved departments who will share their work on the project, and discuss their motivations and takeaways.

*magazines made for love, not money