“Where do we go from here?” One way that the Vassar College Library is answering this question is by making concerted efforts to promote unique or rarely held materials—that is, nurturing collections that will make us stand out from the crowd. With that goal in mind, the Vassar College Library has spent the past year working to create a collection of zines.
This session will discuss the importance of social media in the acquisition of zines, using the Vassar College Library’s experience as an example. Zines are DIY, self-published materials that are a vibrant and creative way to represent diverse points of view in your collection; however, with DIY publications come a host of new collection development and acquisition hurdles to consider. Since zines are produced outside of the purview of for-profit publishers, librarians cannot rely on our comfortable and well-established mechanisms to explore and acquire these materials. Using social media to inform collection development can be daunting, but if zines are a medium your library wants to pursue, doing a little bit of networking can go a long way.
Participants will learn about the Vassar zine collection development plan, and different ways that we use social media (particularly Tumblr and Twitter) to fulfill our mission. Different online zine distributors (or distros) will also be discussed, as well as the wealth of materials to be found from individual zinesters via avenues typically not utilized by libraries, such as Etsy. The topic of ethical zine acquisitions will also be explored.
