The Salford Zine Library cataloguing project

摘要

I’ve been running Salford Zine Library - a not-for-profit archive of self-published materials housed at Nexus Art Café in Manchester - with my partner since some time in 2013. We reckon that the collection comprises of around 1500 zines but we have absolutely no evidence to support this claim. There’s no selection policy and all of the collection has been donated over the last few years. We’re always looking for more. Our aim is to promote and encourage the enjoyment of reading and making zines through workshops, exhibitions and other outreach activities, while also helping to facilitate research into zines and DIY culture. We do talks in schools and colleges and try and take the collection around the country as much as possible. There’s currently no catalogue or even an inventory, so we can’t even say for sure what we have. This is about to change, though. We’ve recently been awarded ￡8,800 by the Heritage Lottery Fund to help us catalogue the collection and build a new website for the library. For this article, I thought it would be useful to talk a little bit about zines and DIY culture before going through the HLF application process. It’s actually a lot easier than you’d think!