librarypunk - 021 - QZAP

Episode Date: July 29, 2021

This week we’re talking with Milo from the Queer Zine Archive Project (QZAP) to talk about what the most goth holiday is. Along the way we talk about zines, metadata for zines, DIY, fairies, and butts. https://qzap.org/v9/index.php https://twitter.com/qzap https://www.instagram.com/queerzines/ 

Welcome to Library Punk, where it's always Wagon Wednesday. I'm Justin. I'm a Skalkom librarian. My pronouns are he and him. Okay, Sadie's not here. I'm Jay. I'm a metadata librarian, and my pronouns are he him. I'm Carrie. I'm a health sciences librarian, and my pronouns are he or, oops, my pronouns are she hurt. What a great day to confuse my pronouns. Pronoun update. I'm just trans and everyone. I'm Milo.

I'm not a librarian at all, but I'm the co-founder of the Queer Zene Archive project, and my pronouns are they in them. Yeah, we're going to talk about the Quirazine Archive. I'm going to learn all about Zines. It's exciting. But first, we have a new segment, Quarantimes. There is a thread on Twitter where people were, where a library canceled their vaccination event with the health department, which I assume they work for the same government, because it is too controversial. and libraries are supposed to be neutral. Just so you know, neutrality spreads disease.

Apparently, from what I could gather from the thread, they're still having an event about COVID, but now they're just not offering vaccines. So now people are going to show up for vaccines and not get them. Hopefully it gets changed. We were promised vaccines and all we got was information. God damn it.

And isn't that just, I don't know, Thanks a lot, libraries. Yeah, go to ALA's website and that'll just be like, we offer you information and that'll be what it is. Here's the evidence against vaccines. That's like the ALA website. Here's why you shouldn't get one because neutrality. Like, fuck you.

Go fuck yourself. Like seriously, go to a corner, go fuck yourself and die. That's all I got to say about that. Damn. Justin's on the drops. Mm-hmm. You were not kidding about these hot drops tonight. Yeah, I had a lot of fun making that quarantine's one.

I mean, it's a good thing that I'm not going to have to get rid of it anytime soon because it's never going away. But Milo just dropped rocky music.org into the chat. Are we going to talk about Rocky Music instead? We don't have to. I mean, I will talk about Rocky Horror Picture Show all day every day, but we don't have to. If that's what this podcast become, I'm just going to leave my kitchen and, like, go hide in my bedroom.

That can be a Halloween episode. So I have a friend who is a zine librarian in Australia, and he self-identifies as a transvestite, and he has for as long as I've known him. And at one point, he was going to help write something about sort of Rocky Horror Picture Show and the language around transvestism, I think probably from a more negative perspective. But so we have a...

haven't quite gotten it together yet, but I feel like it's going to be a fascinating zine article whenever he finishes it. Yeah, I would love to read that and also meet your friend. That sounds very cool. Well, if we can ever get past this global pandemic and we can go back to Australia or get them to come here, it would be amazing. Yeah, library that canceled their vaccination event because neutrality. Do your part, damn it. Public health is a team sport. So, nice. I'm going to leave the echo in for that one. It surrounds. sound. It's like being in Pump Up the Volume, which is my favorite movie ever.

Oh, by the way, 94 days until Halloween. So. Not that we're counting. No. Don't have a big button on my computer. I'm absolutely not counting because I've given up on Halloween. Oh, yeah. Like, we won't get to do anything, but, you know.

No, the real goth holiday, if you're going to celebrate, is none of them. Hmm. I don't know. Look, there's got to be some more goth holidays. It's actually Maud's birthday, which is March 29th. Put it on your calendar, folks. Send cards. Maybe by March we'll set up a PO box for Maud.

Just send all of Maud's cards to QZAP. Yeah. Make Zines, make queer zines for Maud's birthday. I'm in. There could be a Maud Zine. Yeah. So the Queer Zine Archive project. Milo, what is a Zine?

I might end up strangling you jumping through the internet to Texas. So zines are handmade publications, usually photocopied, not necessarily. My go-to description is from Jenna Friedman, who's the zine librarian at Barnard. If y'all give me a second here, I will look that up. Live information searching. It's from magazine, not magazine. Yeah, but I'm still not going to call it live guides. That is not the same thing.

Yeah, it is. So this is from Jenna's article. Zines are not blogs. And she says definitions of the word zine very tremendously, but they do have these common characteristics. Self-published and the publisher doesn't answer to anyone. Small self-distributed print run, motivated by a desire to express oneself rather than to make money,

outside of the mainstream, low budget. for the sake of this discussion, she adds, no need for any special equipment or knowledge. They're portable. They're an expression of DIY or do-it-yourself culture. They foster a community among their creators and readers. Those are sort of Jenna's talking points, and that's usually what I refer to when I talk about zines,

because she said it way more succinctly than almost anybody that I've ever met. But yeah, zines are, they're handmade publications. They're usually four pages, or more in multiples of four, but not always. They can vary in size, shape, color, texture. They're made to be red or looked at or tossed off to or whatever. They have their roots in a couple of different places.

So if we look historically backwards, you can say that zines kind of came out of a self-publishing movement in science fiction fandom communities in the beginning part of the 20th century, around the 1920s and 30s. But for the most part, when we talk about zines, we really think of stuff that came out of, like to say, the beginning of punk rock isn't quite fair,

but coming out of a time period of a lot of social upheaval in the United States and sort of around the world, and the ethos of punk definitely echoes and has real strong roots in how zines got created and published in terms of being do-it-yourself and in terms of being created initially as a way to share information and share stories and, you know, sort of talk up a scene. And, you know, so if we take the beginnings of punk in the mid-70s as a starting point

and move forward, that's kind of how we date zines, essentially. Yeah. So I wanted to tie this in. Since we're talking about DIY and punk, we had an episode about MakerSpace. and we talked about the gender dynamics about DIY as tending to be sort of male-dominated spaces. Does you see that? Well, we have like a gear-toucher sort of Punisher aspect discussion to it. I think the summary of that is that like the idea of makerness in the stem context is really masculine.

But like there's a lot of femme DIY stuff that's like the aspect of craft is more female, but the aspect of Maker is more male and masculine. And that seems to be more male-dominated. We talked about the gender aspects of that. Yeah. I was just wondering if there was any kind of interesting gender dynamic that went on within zine publishing that could parallel those subcultures. I don't think so. I mean, I don't think that it's delineated in that way.

If you look specifically at sort of queer and feminist scenes, you know, I think at the beginning of the queer zine revolution in the mid-1980s, thinking about homicor core and queer core, it was a pretty mixed-gendered group of folks who were involved in that. And then as you move forward into the early 1990s and sort of the explosion of riot girl and the explosion of grunge as sort of a post-post-punk kind of thing, certainly folks of all different genders were participating in making,

making music, making film, making print publications, zines, often with different agendas. So, you know, when we talk about Riot Girl, of course, a lot of it is pushing back against, you know, macho bullshit and sort of the violence and agronists that came from predominantly white hardcore scenes, you know, especially coming out of L.A. and up and down the West Coast a little bit. But at the same time, you see that happening in D.C. and the D.C. Riot Girl scene, scene and sort of the mixed genderness of the folks who are involved with positive force and who end up being parts of bad brains and Fugazi and things like that. Like a lot of it was folks saying, fuck this, we're not going to participate in this sexist

bullshit. And, you know, at the same time, you know, as this was happening, there really is a pushback against a lot of that sort of, I want to say binary thinking a little bit. Could you talk more about the connection between. Zines and fighting back against, or not necessarily fighting back, but like the pushback against capitalism and capitalist modes of production and publication? Sure. So one of the things that Jenna aptly points out is that Zines are self-publish and the publisher doesn't answer to anybody that the print runs are distributed by the self

or by the zine maker themselves. And they're really motivated to, by the desire. to create something and to express oneself rather than to make money. So when we look at other media structures, and it's not just an individual piece of media, but like the whole structure, most mass media around the world is set up to make money for somebody. And even if it's public media, you're still making money for public radio or for PBS or for, you know, CBC or whomever. And to make media, I mean, even now, as we're currently making media, you know, there are four people working on this right now, right?

You know, certainly a lot of podcasts and a lot of podcasters are able to do it with one or two people. And so this is pretty small as far as these things go. But if you look at almost anything else, traditional broadcast radio, television, newspapers, magazines, you know, there's whole teams of people who are involved in getting that produced. and for the most part, all of the funding for that comes from advertising. And because advertisers are paying money to have their products chilled in some other format to get people to buy their shit, you know, even if there's a supposed separation between advertising and editorial, there isn't really, you know. And I think that when it comes to zines, most zine makers have thrown all of that shit out

completely. And they're like, fuck this. We're not participating in the system. And, you know, even if they take advertisements to cover the cost of production, you know, they know their audience well enough and they know their advertisers well enough so that they find the small indie businesses who aren't going to sweat it if their record shop or, you know, their local community radio station or podcast, you know, throws them $20 to have their ad run in 100 copies of their zine. Yeah, or like since like I've been to Inside Kuzep before, I know they're. there's like some, some of the earlier, like, queer zines have, like, personals in them, which serve a very important community purpose, right? Or, like, for being able to buy your extra large lady shoes for, you know,

whatever purpose, you know, like, even the advertising serves a purpose within the community to some extent. I mean, I thought there's a community purpose for getting people laid because that is important. That is an important community purpose. Job less. So, yeah, I don't know if that's. what you're like sort of what you're thinking about but when I talk about media and zine media specifically that's one of the things that I often think about is like how to make how does making a zine compared to making a TV show or making a magazine you know even if the subject is the same

what makes my zine different from the advocate or from out or something like that yeah that makes sense to me. I also saw a definition of zines that said part of the definition of being a zine is the mode of distribution, so the hand-to-hand distribution parts, which is something I don't know if that still holds true, but it is an interesting way to define if something is in a genre. Well, I think, you know, one of the things is zine print runs tend to be relatively small, and so making a thousand copies of your zine is a huge. huge. And there certainly are some zines that have started out small, and they've managed to get fairly large distribution, especially sort of pre-millium, when there were more brick-and-mortar

spaces that zines were accessible at. And some pretty well-known titles like Ben is Dead or Comet Bus. Doris. Doris. What was that? Doris. Doris. You know, they, and because they've gotten bigger distribution, you were able, at point to be able to walk into a tower records and pick up a copy of Ben is dead. And that

could happen in L.A. or it could happen in San Francisco or it could happen in New York because they had managed to get distribution channels that were big enough for that. And they were doing print runs that were big enough for that. But really those are pretty much outlier cases, I

think. So, yeah, when we think about distribution these days, it is hand-to-hand or, you know, and it's done through a distro through the internet or whatever. But it's still pretty small potatoes compared to other media formats. Awesome. We've got a question in here that is, what is a barefoot archive, which I'm interested

to know because I didn't write the notes this week. So the term barefoot archive or barefoot library, to the best of my knowledge, and I was just checking in with some other folks, I think it was coined by Lillian. who used to be the zine librarian at the IPRC in Portland, Oregon. The IPRC is the Independent Publishing Resource Center. And it was just a way of describing non-affiliated libraries and archives, specifically that we're working with zines. But sort of not dissimilar from an infoshop,

but if we think about zine librarianship itself as having kind of three legs, You have academic libraries which collect zines. You have public libraries which collect zines. And then you have independent zine libraries. And QZep is an example of that, although we're a digital archive. The Denver Zine Library in Denver, Colorado is that paper cut zine library in Cambridge, Massachusetts is that. And so I don't know how barefoot got coined other than the fact that it totally makes sense. So when we talk about barefoot libraries, we are talking about libraries and collections that are non-public library affiliated and non-academic library affiliated.

Yeah. If Internet Archive has taught us anything, it's being a digital archive, you can still keep calling yourself a library, whether or not it's true. I realize I kind of skipped over what, like the origins of QZAP. When did QZAP start and how did it get started? So we started QZAP. We recognize our birth date as November 3rd, 2003, because when we look at the wayback machine at the afternoon archive, that's the first date that they have spidered for us. The fact of the matter is that, of course, we started a little bit earlier than that because the spiders weren't out running around all night that weekend. But basically, it was right after Halloween in 2003.

And we had been building the site out probably for a couple of weeks ahead of that. And so we had gotten started. Like I said, I'm the co-founder. Chris Wilde is the other co-founder. They're my partner in crime. And when we first met and started dating, we were doing some organizing within a radical queer community in San Francisco. And we would be sitting in organizing meetings.

And questions would come up about sex and gender and accessibility and what is queer and what isn't queer. and how do we say what this is for and who is, you know, and we were kind of stupid and giddy. And also we were both zine makers and had zine collections. And so we'd be sitting in these organizing meetings across the room from each other because we didn't want to be that couple. And afterwards we'd meet up outside and I'd have a smoke and they'd say, hey, did so-and-so write about this and such and such?

And I'd say, you know, I can't remember if it was this or was that scene. But the idea was that all of those questions had been asked at least. And people were thinking about it. People were writing about it in the decade preceding, you know, or 15 years preceding when we were actually doing this organizing. And so the question was, hey, we've collected a whole bunch of zines. You know, we didn't have the hugest collection, but we definitely had file boxes full of them. How do we share them?

And in 2003, there was no Google books. I mean, Prelinger was doing amazing work and it has always been doing amazing work for the most part. But he didn't really have zines online. As we're having this conversation, Chris is at home actually writing an article about this exact subject. So we've been talking about it a lot this week. But he didn't want to come over because he was too busy writing. Sorry, I'm just going to dis Chris for a quick second. It's really important that he finishes with historical.

Okay, Chris, go finish your article. It's fine. You're just missing out on a really good time right now. I still love you. So what we've been talking about is that when we started QZAP, we knew of other zine libraries. There weren't a lot of them, but the ZAP, the Zine Archive Publishing Project, which was at the time at the Hugo House in Seattle, and that was a really big collection. ABC, no Rio in New York City had been around forever in a day and they had a really big zine collection. I don't remember if paper cut had opened up yet. This is the one that's in Boston. Was I-N-C around yet?

What? I-M-C in Champaign. Was that around yet? It wasn't. But part of what we've been talking about is, well, what's the timeline? What are the origins? And so I was like, hey, if we look historically,

what led up to all of this? And what I was saying to him yesterday when I got home from work and we were talking about it was let's start with a Battle of Seattle in 1999, right? And so you have these big anti-WTO protests happening. You have lots of zines being created. And because the internet at that point was still pretty young, but it was there. But it wasn't super accessible to everyone. No. But what came out of that was indie media and the concept of indie media as a note.

So that's 1999. In 2000, we have all of these protests happening around the National Association of Broadcasters was happening in San Francisco. And so a whole bunch of indie media activists were protesting NAB. And with those things, so we have some indie media happening. We have the Radio Free Berkeley Pirate Radio Handbook was published around that time, or at least one of the editions. It might have been published a little bit earlier than that. And then these zine libraries. And so there's precedence for other independent media things happening, but nobody was putting zines online.

And so we're like, well, we'll start to do this. We'll focus on our queer punk communities. And that was kind of the birth of the idea. And then we just had to figure out how to do it. And it says nine, but it's probably like 13th revision of our website in almost 17 years. I think that's healthy. Like you should be revising your website that much. much. Yeah. Like that's good, especially in that long of time, like for 17 years, that's like a good

number of revisions for your website. Well, and so what we started with was we started with our personal collections, which totaled probably about 350 zines. And from that November 3, 2003 date, we initially uploaded 20 or 25 zines. Currently, we have just about 600 zines online, and we've never done a full count. And we were just starting to do a full count when the stay-home orders started a year and a half ago. And so we have some of the infrastructure in place, and we have tabs of where we stopped counting, and we've been on pause. So we're hoping within the next year or so as we get, if things get better, which at this point I feel like I'm losing hope again,

to continue that project of just trying to get a sense of how many zines we have. But usually the number that I throw out is upwards of 2,500, just queer publications. And that's why your library should have a vaccination event so that QZAP can do its inventory. I wonder if we could have a vaccination event at QZAP. Get vaccinated. Make a zine. It's a great time. Yeah, you should. I love being vaccinated. It's great. I'm kind of curious. We've got a question here about your collection strategy.

How do you go about collecting and then as a follow-up? What's the relationship between the physical and the digital going on at QZap? So I don't know that we've ever had a strategy because that's way too militaristic for our hippie asses. but we do have a collection policy, which you can find on our website, which I'm going to look it up and I'm going to read it to y'all. Read the fucking syllabus. Is that what you're saying?

I mean, it doesn't hurt, right? So yeah, if you go to our website and look at about Q's app and then look at the collection policy, we talk a little bit about zines. Basically, I reiterated what Jenna had said, so I could have gone to my own website to look that up. So, but part of our FAQ is, so if that's a zine, what's a queer zine? And our answer was, at QZAP, we've taken a broad view of what makes a zine queer.

For our purpose is, if the content of the zine is queer, then the zine is queer. Additionally, if the creator identifies as queer, then the zine is queer. So that's basically what it is. And then we go on to say, well, how do you define queer? And we say, queer is all about people's expression of gender and sexuality. This is not exclusive by any means, but people who are queer or who idea is queer may use descriptors like queer, queer, gay, lesbian, bisexual, faggot, dyke, trans, tranny, queen, king, princess, Nancy boy, brucey boy, Nelly, Fem, Butch, Bulldegger, Polyamress, pansexual, omnisexual, asexual, homo, saffist, fairy, and of course, friend of Dorothy. I want to put a beat behind that. I really hope that, like, we need that as like a drop for the pod.

is just Milo saying all of those things. So the next question is, okay, that's people. What about queer content? And we say queer content can literally be anything created by folks who identify as above. That said, most common content you'll find at QZAP is usually about the following. Sex, same gender sex, same gender love, same gender attraction and desire, gender, transgender issues, bisexuality, sexual health, HIV AIDS, STIs and STVs, safer sex, music, pop calls. culture, feminism, activism, politics, racism, classism, fat phobia, ageism, traveling, anti-assimilationism, art, DIY, comics, erotica and porn, journaling, and diary zines, manifestos.

And on the list is poetry, but we actually have a pretty standard policy of trying not to collect poetry because poetry scenes suck. Yeah, no, I'm a bad queer because I'm like slam poetry is the worst and we should all stop. I'm done. To be fair, my roots are in slam poetry. Way, way, way back in the day. Oh, shit. Things are about to get ugly.

Milo should just slam Jay with some poetry into a corner right now. I imagine your poetry's good, though. It's terrible. See, slam poetry. It's bad. I stopped doing slam poetry when my friend Jay died of AIDS. Oh, man, that's a bummer. That's not why slampoistry's bad.

Anyway, I'm drinking a martini and like backing away now. So the other thing, you know, when we say Zines can literally, queer zines are literally about anything by people who identify as being queer. Some of my favorite zines in our collection are Raptor Fancy, which is like cat fancy except with dinosaurs. interview with a zombie, which is exactly what it sounds like. How gay is that one? It was written by this really sweet lesbian couple.

So are vampires gays and then zombies are lesbians? Because I always thought like werewolves was like the lesbian monster. Really? I don't think so. No. I don't think there's a direct translation to mythical creatures and people in the LGBTQ alphabet soup and how they identify. I don't think there's any kind of direct correlation.

No scientific. Oh, okay. I'm a scientist, okay? Except for fairies. Oh, yeah. Except for fairies. There's a very clear correlation there. Let's not fuck around. Where would we be without the radical fairies is all I'm saying?

Preach. Yeah, like how many like, oh God, what's the, that one, do you'll have that like one radical fairy zine? Oh, God. Radical fairy diatist? remember what. I love that there's a digest. What are they digesting, though?

That's a question. Children. So RFD is one of the longest running queer publications in the country. That makes me so happy. So you'd asked about collection strategy, and I started jokingly said we don't have a strategy, but... Just no fucking poetry, right? If we can help it. And poetry comes through sometimes.

It sneaks through. We try not to be assholes about it. I feel like that's a good collection policy. Right? Just like, come on, man. Don't be an asshole about it, man. Where's that drop? Just be cool, man.

Just be cool, man. Just be cool. Where's the drop, Justin? I don't have it. No. Oh, God. I lost it. I don't know where it went.

I have to add it back. No? Okay. Come on. And for the flip side of collection development, well, not really a flip side, but Carrie put in a question, do you weed? Smoke, smoke, smoke, weed. Damn, Sean, where'd you find this? Smoke, smoke, smoke weed. I do.

Well, moving on then. Next question, I guess. I mean, do you want me to tell you about how I make my own edibles? Like, you can look at my last scene and read the recipe. It's just, I printed out. So. Oh, I missed that one. I was reading your other one. I've never had one.

It's not legal in this state. Neither has sodomy. That's one of my favorite Rocky horror callbacks. There's no crime of giving yourself over to pleasure. Except here. We've got. metadata questions in here. You rang.

So I looked at the X X Xencore X standards, which is modified Dublin Core. How do you do the metadata in Q's app? Seeing as I help to write Zincor, we use Zincor. Makes sense. How did you get there, though? So, first of all, we had to write Zincor. We had to come up with something that would be shareable, that would be used across libraries and library systems.

And prior to that, we just kind of made up our own metadata. I mean, not made it up, but the way that we acquired it is, of course, we read through or at least skim through every zine that we digitize, and we try to pull out all the pertinent information. Having not gone to library school and having never been a cataloger, we kind of did the best that we could, but we figured the most important piece of information, especially for us, or one of the reasons that it's super important for us is because our policy has always been that we don't want to know who you are when you come to our website. And because we don't want to

know who you are, we don't want to know what you're looking for. So we're making all sorts of assumptions on different ways that you could search for information. And the reason that we've always taken this stance is because kind of from the get-go, we've said, hey, we've got all of these amazing zines, and we consider them to be dangerous, right? Talking about sex, talking about drugs, talking about rock and roll is really fucking scary, especially when you're talking about queer sex and queer drugs and queer rock and roll. And depending on who you are or where you are, you know, it may be prohibited information. Certainly, to some degree, we have quite a bit of freedom with that here in the States

that not everybody has the privilege of being able to sort of access things like that. because of this desire to keep, I'm using big finger quotes to say patrons, but to keep our patrons anonymous, unless somebody contacts us, we don't honestly don't know who is visiting our website, we don't know how they're accessing the materials, we don't know what they're looking for. Because of that, we had to kind of guess and say, well, how do we think about zines? How do we try to find information? And so, you know, the most obvious thing is, if you can remember a title, that's great. You know, I know that I'm looking for Doris. I know that I'm looking for Raptor Fancy, right? You know, so in that sense, wonderful. The title's really, really easy. But if you can't remember the title and you're like, God, I read that article. It was by the person who put out that zine,

and this other zine was by them, and it's all about consent. Shit, who was that? Oh, well, that was Cindy Ovenrack. Oh, that's Cindy Crab. Okay. So, you know, then you got a creator name, an author. and if you can find that information, that's great.

But of course, zines being zines, don't necessarily have anybody's name on them. It's not like a book title or a book jacket where the author's name is listed really clearly. And then the other points of metadata to us that seemed really important. And again, thinking about how we find things or how we were looking for things is, well, shit, I can't remember the name of that zine, but I remember that I bought it at Bound Together in San Francisco in 1997. found together being the anarchist bookstore that's on Hate Street. And I know that it was published in San Francisco. I remember there was definitely a local zine.

So now we've got a year look through and figure out either because somebody's been thoughtful enough to include the year somewhere in the zine, or they've given enough context clues to say, oh, this album just came out and you can look up and figure out when this album came out or when this TV show happened. And San Francisco, you know, as the place of origin. And so being able to have some date information and have some geolocation information, whatever we can sort of pull out from reading the zines ourselves, those seem to be the four really big points.

Then the next question, which I'm sure will come up, as Jay and I talk about this in a couple of minutes, but looking for other standards of metadata and how to figure that out. because some folks used Library of Congress subject headings. When we started in 2003, we didn't know what that was. You know, we talked to our friends in library land, and they're like, well, there are all these fields in Mark, and you can figure out how to, and I was like, what's that? And so we looked at doing that for a year or two,

and then we're like, no, this is way too complicated. We're not smart enough to figure that shit out. And it seems like everybody's moving away from Mark anyway, so good on us for dodging that bullet. So what we ended up coming up with was, well, we can just use keywords and what makes a keyword a keyword. And it's like if we're reading through a zine and something pops out at us, then we include it. And so if you look at the metadata that we include, it's kind of all over the place because

I don't know what people are looking for. So, you know, we kind of throw everything in and see what sticks and hope that if somebody comes across a zine and they're reading through and they look at the metadata on the side and they see that, oh, disseen has a keyword that includes Madonna. Then you click on that, and it should take you to anything else in our system that has been keyworded with Madonna. And so our current system is really much better at allowing for faceted metadata that way. Our initial system, we still had the keywords, but everything was in a flat text field,

and we had no search capabilities and it was poopy, poopy pants. I just clicked the link that Justin put in the chat of the Madonna search and I really want to read this Pussy Grazer. My name is not Justin, thanks.

Oh, was it not Justin? Oh, it's Carrie. Sorry, I can't read. Yeah, Pussy Grazer looks great. Giant Ass catalog seems really good. Is fluff and nutter about porn? I want to know. I actually have a copy of Dragazine that's got a drag queen on it who's being Norma Desmond on the cover.

It's very fun. We just posted a cover from Dragazine to Instagram on Saturday. Awesome. Yeah, I did my, when I was in grad school, I did my practicum at the Gerber Heart in Chicago, which for listeners who aren't aware, that is in Chicago, it's LGBT library archives and special collections. focuses on like Chicago history but their library is just open to the public and just a general collection and it's all volunteer run and everything and I was helping them weed all of their journals and stuff and getting rid of duplicates and instead of throwing away they're like well you can take home duplicates and so that's how I got the dragazine so I thought giant ass looked familiar to me

and I took a quick look and I was like oh that looks like the hot head pison and sure as fuck is the Same author as Hothead Paison. Diane DiMassia. Yep. So sorry to blow that one for you, but it's Hothead Pison, which is a great classic lesbian comic that I got into for a while. We might have a full run. I think I've read the full run, actually, because they did a bound collection. And they had a bunch of it.

I don't know. I did a whole thing on queer comics when I was in grad school because why the fuck not? Anyway, that's a derailment. Cool. Let's keep talking about metadata. All day or day, baby. You're right that you really missed, you really dodged a bullet with not doing Mark cataloging. I was going to mention a friend of mine who is no longer librarian, but was a rare book cataloger and wrote an article about the difficulties of cataloging zines because with all of our cataloging rules and the ways that you have, I'm doing error quotes, half to catalog things.

these are our rules. I really don't understand why we can't break them. But the problem with serialization, the problem with title changes, all these things really, really fuck with cataloging rules. And so it makes a lot more sense to do modern metadata with like Dublin core. And even then Dublin core can actually be one thing I found is that like because of how broad in general Dublin core can be, it can actually be kind of terrible for specific use cases. Like we use Dublin core for our digital collections and it's like where do you put scan like scanning information in it in Dublin core so I really like that you sort of took Dublin core and then made like a zine specific version that's like my main critique of Dublin core is that it's actually just too broad to be

useful half the time so I guess what was your decision making process or why with your with your zine core schema like why based it on Dublin core what did you choose to change what did you choose to what was that sort of like. If you'll stand by for just a second. Because I did see that there's a zine about zincor which is very fun. Which I wrote. Which I love that.

So it all came out of a discussion from the zine librarian's unconference that happened in Milwaukee in, gosh, this might have been the 2011 conference. But hang on a sec, where'd you go? But basically we were trying to figure out

even coming up with zine corps is part of a much bigger project, which is to develop a union catalog for zines. Right. And we have one in its most nascent form called Zinecat that folks have been working on for a decade now. Another big holler to Jenna Freeman on that one. Yeah. Shout out. I'm trying to see if it's somewhere.

Stand by. I'm searching. This is a research-based podcast. just so you know. We like to do research, just so we get all of our facts straight. There's no misinformation here. None of it. None whatsoever.

Oh yeah. Here's a Kerry question. How do you do information literacy if anyone can publish a zine? I mean, just anyone can say anything. How do you know what is true and what is not without proper access control? All right. We got a link. So the link pops to the zine-cour zine.

and in the zincororchene, there's a photograph of the original whiteboard where we took doubling core on one side and we took what zincor could be on the other and we drew a whole bunch of arrows to match the fields up. If you scroll down to page five. Oh, I love this. I like the Talking Heads references. Yeah.

So I can't say that all of that has made it into zine core as it stands now, but part of what's amazing about zincor is that it's kind of evolving or evolvable. and, you know, to sort of, I don't know if this is helpful for you, Jay, but for sure we included a couple of notes fields. So thinking about scanning metadata, if there's no place else to put it, stick it in the private notes so that other catalogers will be able to see it when they pull up the record, but it won't necessarily be public facing. Right. It's not the most elegant solution. And also, we're a bunch of fucking punks making zines.

So what are you going to do? Like sometimes the scanners. just like let me take a picture on my phone. There's a lot of anarchy there. It's fine. Yeah. I support it. I guess another question I have then is as far as creating the metadata within Zincoror,

are there any specific standards you use for like how you describe things within the elements or is it sort of like is there any sort of consistency or I'm sure you don't use RDA? But. So for us at QZE, we have, it's basically like the physical description field. And for the most part, we base that off of the codes that Larry Bob Roberts used to use in his, and his queer zine explosion zine where he put out a zine for a long time where he talked about all the queer zines that people would send to him.

And in every issue of QZE, next to every zine, there would be a code that would describe the zine itself. So is it standard? is it half standard? Is it digest size? Is it legal? And I think that that was based somewhat on, and it's all based on paper size.

Right? Right. So, U.S. paper size and then international A4, A5, A6 sizes. And we've taken that, we've expanded upon it for our use case. But that for us was the starting point. And I know that in other libraries, when you describe documents, you would do it metric, right?

I think so. It's been like since grad school since I touched a mark record. I have not done any cataloging since 2011, and it was one semester. And I know there's like a weird way you measure things. Like you measure diagonally across the book to get the measurement. Okay. Yeah, it depends on what standard you're using. Yeah.

We use AACR2 when I learned how to measure. catalog with ACR2 so what the fuck do I know but yeah you you use centimeters and you measured diagonally across the book which was how you got the dimensions yeah and then I'm assuming for things like title and author you just sort of transcribe as is let the thing describe itself which brings me to my next thing so I noticed and I noticed this because I went to the the zine library unconference in salt lake in 2019 that's where we met and especially when there was the bingo there was like this great anarchist anti-copyright statement on everything. And so I'm wondering how sort of these anarchist and queer politics and frameworks influence

how you do metadata, like standardization and what standards you follow and what you choose to record and whatnot and how. Like, anarchy plus metadata is something I'm fascinated with as an anarchist and a metadata librarian. Same the same. I don't know if I can. can, certainly I'm not going to speak for anybody other than our own use case, but one of the things that came out of how we did Zincor that we talk about pretty explicitly, and it's not just a QZEF, but sort of across the board is rather than having a field that is copyright

information, because fuck that noise, we have rights and permissions, which is a way, you know, so for my zines that I personally make, the vast majority of them are creative comments. So in our rights and permissions field, I can explicitly say this zine was made by Milo and it has a Creative Commons non-commercial attribution 3.0 international license. And I can link directly to the Creative Commons metadata that tells you exactly what permissions you have for that license. Right. That's the best thing about a Creative Commons. Right. But in other cases, if somebody says copy freely and duplicate, then we can include that in the rights and comments field. If we don't know or if it doesn't say anything, then we, at Q's app, automatically put in assume copyright because the copyright is always assumed by the creator,

and then the creator gets to decide what they want to do with it after that fact. The bingo game of which you speak, basically, Jenna had been collecting copyright statements, and so I compiled a whole bunch of them and made bingo cards out of them. It was really fun. I don't know if you've noticed, but I know on GitHub, one of the licensed templates you can use is the unlicensed, or it's like, fuck that noise, I wave all copyright. This is in the public domain kind of thing. Yeah. So, you know, to answer the bigger question, we do think about that and we do say, this is how library structures have things now. And we didn't have enough information at the time when they created these things or they're just fucking doing it wrong. Since we're building our own thing that's going to be better anyway, why don't we do it the way that makes it? The way that makes it. We're just fucking doing it. the most sense for us. Right. You know, and I think that SeenCat in and of itself reflects that.

Right. To make space for things, even if we don't know that we're necessarily going to use it. And also to say, you've done it this way. And we can use some of this, but we don't have to use all of it. Like, one of the things that's great about Dublin Core and, consequently, zine core, is a lot of the fields are duplicatable. Yes. That is the thing I like about Dublin Core.

So in our instance, we have hooks that could plug into LCSH right now. But there's no reason why we couldn't have LCSH for subject headings and use Homoosaurus and use Anchor Archive, Zene Libraries, subject headings, because we can have multiples of that metadata. Right. Which brings me to another question. So I'm on the editorial board for the Homoosaurus. and also being someone who's like a huge semiotics and like linguistic philosophy nerd, especially with regards to queer theory is this whole like, well,

queerness is something that refuses to be defined and yet I'm on a queer taxonomy. And by defining things, you are inherently putting boundaries around like things. And so I don't know like when you are creating keywords for things or any other sort of definitions or just any sort of structure within QZAP and within discreet. if that sort of bumping up against like the very nature of queerness has caused any issues or like enlightened you in any way or just anything interesting about that. I would love to hear about it. Yeah. Absolutely. So for us, one of the most tragic things that happened with the onset of the pandemic is that Sarah, who had been our intern, volunteer, they were a MLS student here in Milwaukee.

and they're queer, and they had been working with us in the hopes of creating a taxonomy that we could use at Kuzap. And when the pandemic came, they had to go back to their country of origin, and so we lost a lot of the great project that they were working on and some of the skills. When it comes to subject stuff, one of the cool things about using keywords is that they're non-hierarchical for us. So, you know, we kind of throw them in willy-nilly, and they're created completely at the whim of whomever is cataloging. And you can really tell if you spend a lot of time on the archive.cuseapp.org site, if an entry has a whole lot of keywords, it was probably done by Chris or myself or somebody who had been working with a project for a long time, whereas there's something that has a much sparser list of keywords. It was probably done by somebody who was an early intern.

maybe a high school student, and they just didn't have the experience of reading super deeply and trying to figure out what the zine was talking about or pulling out the random bullshit pop culture stuff that we think people might search on. Because again, we don't know who you are. Right, right. And, you know, one of the fun things for us is that because it's keywords, we can add to it. And when we get zine donations and we ask for permission to put the zines online in the first place, We ask people to fill out a form that gives us most of the metadata so we can use the words that the creators themselves said are the keywords. And then we can add on top of that.

Oh, yeah. I like that. Is there any sort of, especially with like spelling inconsistencies, like if there's like a typo or anything? Is there any way of like sort of sim linking like typoed words together? Like say you do transsexual with two S's or one S kind of thing? I think if we caught a type of. like that we'd go back and correct it in the record. Okay. Yeah. But for some stuff

early on, we used comics C-O-M-I-C-S and comics C-O-M-I-X in the underground comics. I feel like we would probably make a choice at this point. Yeah, because there's like a semantic difference between them. Yes, there is. And I feel like if you're dealing with

like, like, okay, so take giant ass or Hothead Pis-Pycin, I feel like that falls very firmly into comics with an X. Like, right? Like, that is I would, my default answer is let's see if we can get a hold of Diane DeMassa and see what they have to say about it. Oh, that would be, you know, the coolest thing, right? But yeah. I would then default second to finding all the queer comic scholars who've come to hang out with us over the last 15 years and ask them.

Yeah. But I feel like maybe I shouldn't say anything about this, but I feel like there's like an inherent undergroundness of everything in the project of a queer archive. Like there's no, to me, comics with an S is published in a, like in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a, in a sanctioned place. Whereas comics with an X is like an unsanctioned or like underground form of comic production. But that's just my own personal take. That's, that's, that is not grounded in any scholarship, even though I have done scholarship on this, um, oddly enough. I think the right answer to this would be to talk to somebody like Rachel Mill, who was a QZAP artist in resident a couple of years ago

and who's now on the editorial board of Comics Journal because she is fucking the V's knees and I feel like she could probably help explain this a whole lot and you should totally have her as a guest on this show podcast at some point in the future. Justin disappeared. He's been raptured. The bunny's got him. Jesus came to get him.

Justin, did the bunnies get you? Did the bunnies get you? Did Jesus get you? No, I'm just thirsty. I bet you are. I am so confused by your drops half the time. Yeah, I was trying to confuse everyone's sexuality so we can force trans, everyone else. We've already got Carrie.

I transcend. Oh, ho. I'm very fulfilled talking about queer metadata and stuff. Well, we're at an hour if you don't want to go much longer. We do have some fun closing questions that Carrie has put in here. One is, what are your favorite records to play when working in the archive? Oh, goodness. I'm trying to think of what's down there that comes up quite often.

They might be Giants Flood, which we have on cassette, the best of Juice Newton, which I think I picked up at Sally Ann's for 50 cents somewhere along the way. We have a CD3 from the homo crime collective in London from 2005-ish. Homokime put out a series of recordings and zines together, and we had a connection with one of the people who are part of the collective, and so every once in a while we would get some of those in the post. And I know that the CD3 has been floating around real close to the top of the pile. Shout out to homo crime.

We acquired a really nice collection of Riot Girl material a couple of years ago from Billy Rain, who is running Riot Girl Press. And in that collection, it was a ton of zines, but then also... It's a killer record collection. Yeah. And it's so many good, like, first pressings to, like, I, like, shit a brick when I saw that. that was like the first thing I went to when I went down to Kuzap and I was just like, what the fuck is this? Like moth to a flame. You know, Bratmobile and Bikini Kill and Nations of Ulysses.

Yeah, I maybe tried to steal that Bratmobile record. Like I see your Bikini Kill, sure, my love. I won't steal your Bratmobile record. So I feel like that gets played down there and then, oh, little earthquakes when nobody else is working down there and it's just me, I kind of play Little Earth. makes a lot because I love that album. Tori Amos' first album. Oh, Tori Amos.

And then we have a question. Best Meals at Kuzup. Okay, so Carrie definitely wrote this question because she knows when it's not pandemic times and we're able to have high school or college students interning with us, because we have zero money and we're not able to pay interns, which is one of the the more frustrating aspects of running the project the way that we do. We try and compensate by saying, look, we'll feed you during your work shift. And so we have this kind of whole litany of different QZAP dinners that we've made. But I think one of the absolute favorites is our zucchini

cheddar pancakes, or zucchini cheddar waffles, I should say. So zucchini waffles come up. Tater-tot casserole is a pretty good vegetarian one. A lot of stir fries. Yeah, tater tat casserole is like a Carrie Wade favorite for sure. You know, vegan ramen night. Oh, can I comfort vegan ramen night? Come and do a residency when you start those up again.

Oh my God, Jay, come and do a residency. I did write the book about it with three other people. This isn't that kind of residency. Oh, a different residency. Okay. This is a vegan ramen residency. I will do so many vegan ramen residencies. And then I just wrote donuts on there because I missed donuts this year.

We didn't do donuts this year. I know. I have more things to say about that off off air, but. I want some donuts. Yes. Cuseap also hosts a secret midnight, a secret not so secret, midnight donuts occasionally. No, just in the middle of the 24. Many of them vegan.

During a 24-hour bike race that happens in our neighborhood the last weekend of July every year. So if you ever come to Milwaukee in the last weekend of July every year. And Jay, at least two or three of our batches are always vegan. Oh, good. And they're fucking banging. Yeah, no, vegan donuts, shout out. They're quite good.

Arthur, what do you do? Arthur's been really playful today. I'm very curious. And he's big stretching because he knows I'm talking about him. Miley, you haven't seen my cat, I don't think. Oh, he just jumped up on the couch. Just on Twitter. There's the king himself.

I don't worship kings. Arthur's a comrade to me. He is a comrade. He must be a communist. Arthur, are you a communist? I take your silence as a yes. So, Milo, to wrap up, how can people get involved with QZEP if they want to?

And where can people find you and more information about QZAP? So we're easily found at qzap.org, and the archive site, if you want to bypass the blogs and all of the interesting things that we've written over the last 17 or 18 years and just get right to the zines is at archive.cup.org. In terms of getting involved with us, mostly when we take on interns, when it's not pandemic years, so hopefully by next year, but it will really kind of depend on what's happening in the world. We may be doing internships again. but usually you have to be in Milwaukee to do one. So we've had folks who have come for the summer and have gotten a side job and then I've also interned with us. But if somebody were interested in that, they could send an email just to QZAP at

QZAP.org. And the residency programs that we've talked about are kind of on hold, again, for health reasons. And because it's basically just the 2OS plus whoever is doing internships or volunteering with us locally. Our artists and residents are kind of by invitation only, which is a little weird and elitist. And also, it's kind of the only way that we could manage it. So, but yeah, those are definitely off the table for a little while. Otherwise, we are on Twitter at at QZAP. We're on Instagram at at queer zines. And I don't know if we're still on Facebook or not because I deleted

my Facebook account and I don't pay attention to that bullshit. If it was to other to your account in any way, it would have, I don't know what happens. I don't care what happens. Fuck Facebook. So yeah, that's how to get a hold of us. Your Twitter is very fun. Everyone go follow them on Twitter. Both Twitter and Instagram are very high quality accounts.

I am the worst about Instagram. I only use it so that selfies and other photos I take get posted at other places without me having to do it manually. And then I don't do anything else on Instagram. I'll trust your system. Yes. Okay. Well, Mila, thanks so much for coming on and talking to us about QZAP and how people can find it.

And I enjoyed reading Soy Boy. I'm probably going to try some of your recipes. Thank you. It was so nice having you on. Thanks so much. This has been a lot of fun. Good night.