The Austin Fanzine Project: Phase Two

A fanzine is a "nonprofessional and nonofficial publication produced by fans of a particular cultural phenomenon (such as a literary or musical genre) for the pleasure of others who share their interest” (Wikipedia). You can think of them as pre-internet blogs. Fanzines are lately gaining popularity in college classrooms, as professors in journalism, anthropology, art, and literature incorporate them into their curricula, and librarians and archivists all over the world are finding ways to increase access to and preservation of these ephemeral, sometimes unique objects of human expression.

Archivist Jennifer Hecker founded Austin Fanzine Project in the summer of 2012 as a way to increase access to the fanzines that document Austin's 1990s underground music scene by crowd sourcing their digitization, transcription and indexing. The project also functions as an ad-hoc learning lab for issues around digitization, transcription, linked data, digital preservation, privacy and copyright, and archival collaboration and innovation.

Phase One of the project was a self-contained test run focusing on only one document. Phase Two has already begun and will feature more material, more complex issues, and more collaboration. Ms. Hecker will introduce the project and describe progress made to date, while UT iSchool master's degree candidate, Kevin Powell, will discuss the policy and workflow issues he addressed during his Spring 2013 Capstone work on the project.