My God, It's Full Of Stars .... I Mean Zines!

[morgandawn]

I had an interesting chat with a zine fan this weekend. She wondered why Fanlore was not tagging or categorizing fanzines by subject: angst, hurt/comfort etc. so she could find zines based on her interests. Putting aside the fact that most anthology zines do  not have a single theme (novels are different), the majority of people working on Fanlore don’t have access to the physical zines, let alone the ability to read them all to come up with categories.

Even using the vast existing Internet resources that date back to the early 1990s, assembling info on a specific zine is tricky. There have been other fans who have created extensive databases and indexes (I blogged about the paper Trekindex today), and there are fandom specific ones like the Karen Halliday Star Trek Zine index, the Star Wars Collector’s Bible, The Starsky & Hutch Compendium and…..well I started a list of these online zine indexes in 2009 here.

The bottom line is that fanzine info is scattered across the Internet and basic fanzine history continues to be lost due to inactivity, neglect, gaffiating, death, and entropy. This makes locating even the simplest info - like tables of contents, story titles, fandoms, page counts and dates -- a monumental undertaking. A monumentally *insane* undertaking as there  are (we guess) 8,000+ fanzines listed on Fanlore. Which makes Fanlore the first and only comprehensive multi-fandom media fanzine listing in media fandoms’ history. Ever. (Or, as I sometimes jokingly call it, it is Fandom's First Memory Alpha....but I will reserve that title for another fanzine history preservation project).

Which is why I am so grateful when someone does take a moment – like the fan I mentioned above – to let me know that they are finding Fanlore’s fanzine index useful and want to make it more useful.*

*Many zine fans use Fanlore to buy and sell their used fanzines or to look for some of their old favorite stories and fandoms. If a zine story is now online, Fanlore can provide a link to the story. And of course if the zine is still for sale, there will be a link to the publisher, agent or distributor.

Comments

[thirdblindmouse]

I've found it useful. I've been poking around on the internet looking for old fan activity around DS9, which existed right on the boundary between online fandom and zine fandom. Fanlore gave me a list of published DS9 stories to look for, and between Google, the Usenet Archive, the Internet Archive, and URL fiddling I've found a lot of new-to-me fic from the mid-1990s that I would never have discovered otherwise.

Does Fanlore have any policies against linking to fic that is not currently online but available on the Internet Archive? If not, I can add some more links to the Fanlore articles I started from. :)

[morgandawn]

I think the policy says that we can use any material that was publicly available: http://fanlore.org/wiki/Fanlore:Citation#Restrictions_on_Quotation.2C_Citation_.26_Linking

If the websites were accessible without restrictions (passwords or membership etc), we can use the material. I've been linking to websites and discussions that are in the WayBack Machine. Fans who want to remove their content from the WayBack Machine can work directly with the WayBack Machine (they have a verification and removal process). Like most Internet Archiving, the WayBack Machine works on an opt out basis (and they also honor no robots.txt). Of course, if your site went offline and your domain name was bought and parked with new owners who have put up a "no robots.txt," your history will be eventually wiped from the WayBack Machine anyway (they cannot distinguish between a no robots.txt placed by new owners or old owners, so it all gets deleted).

[thirdblindmouse]

they cannot distinguish between a no robots.txt placed by new owners or old owners, so it all gets deleted

Egads. Knowing this, in the future I'll be careful to save local copies of pages found on the WayBack Machine.