The Zombie Stack Exchanges That Just Won't Die
Books and periodicals, etc. are relatively easily catalogued in an academic setting. What about alternative materials, such as zines? Is there an easy way to catalogue those sorts of materials?
Note: For the purposes of this question, assume I am talking about zine publications.
Ashley Nunn
A friend of mine once worked in the Berlin Archiv der Jugendkulturen (archive of youth culture), which has the largest collection of fanzines in Europe (>20.000). I don't know, how they are cataloged and its no academic library but a special library without interlibrary loan, so cataloging might be limited. For patrons, however, a large collection with simple bibliographic records is often more useful than a small collection with complicated and incomplete bibliographic records that only exist because some libraries either want a perfect record (in their own system of course) or none ;-)
Cataloguing records for zines have the same standards as the rest of materials in an academic library. Various libraries maintain different levels of cataloguing based upon various factors such as:
It depends upon the amount of material, the time frame and what purpose the collection has been acquired for, such as a donation/bequest, for primary academic referencing or as material for researchers. This will provide a basis for how detailed a record will be, although in most examples on Trove, a fairly basic record seems to be the norm: Biblio-curiosa, The inter active review magazine, Kilter: the journal of GothicArtChicago
You may want to contact someone at the Minneapolis Community and Technical College Zine Library to see if they would be willing to share their processes with you:
At Michigan State University, we catalog zines more or less exactly like we catalog other more conventional publications. We'll catalog them as books or serials - determining which method to use on a case-by-case basis. I do most of the zine cataloging myself. I catalog them in MARC using AACR2 (for the time being, anyway - RDA is right around the corner). So they're just as "easy" as other materials, in a sense. However, I do avail myself of certain non-required treatments, like adding summary notes to enhance keyword access and genre headings to aid in collocation of zines based on genre. I find these treatments important to circumvent some of the value-laden language of controlled vocabulary subject terms (for example, making sure that someone searching for queer zines can find them, despite the fact that that's not language that would occur in Library of Congress Subject Headings).
For other libraries, considerations such as time and the availability of copy cataloging may be a factor, so they might consider cataloging zines as a collection, rather than item by item. Still others may do item by item cataloging, but forego MARC and AACR2 to use a homegrown database.
Jenna Freedman at Barnard College has worked with zines, including cataloging, for several years. This chapter of hers is helpful for thinking about zine cataloging: