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Digitising the Ian MacKaye digital collection of punk fanzines at the University of Maryland
Journal of Digital Media Management,
12
(2),
176-186
(2023)
Abstract
The Ian MacKaye digital collection of punk fanzines at the University of Maryland (UMD) includes more than 1,000 digitised zines, originally collected by a notable punk rock musician. These ephemeral publications document details of the punk subculture that are often obscured by time or scarcity, rendering it all the more important to preserve and make accessible the information within them before they disappear. To create this digital collection, Special Collections in Performing Arts at UMD pivoted from some of its common practices for accessioning or digitising a collection, experimenting instead with different approaches. This paper describes the context for the collection, as well as the curatorial decisions and digitisation workflows that ultimately made the digitised zines accessible to researchers and fans of the punk subculture.
Keywords: archives; punk; fanzines; digitisation; subcultures; publications
The full article is available to subscribers to the journal.
Author's Biography
John R. Davis is the Curator of Special Collections in Performing Arts in the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library (MSPAL) at the University of Maryland. He is a certified archivist and holds a master’s degree in library and information science from the Catholic University of America. He has curated and co-curated exhibits at MSPAL and the Lost Origins Gallery in Washington, DC. His articles have appeared in the Music Library Association’s journal Notes, the Journal of Popular Culture, Punk & Post-Punk, the Washington Post and NPR’s All Songs Considered. He also contributed the chapter, ‘Always now: punk in Washington DC, 2010–2019’, to the book, ‘Trans-Global Punk Scenes, The Punk Reader, Volume 2’ (Intellect Books, 2021). He is currently writing ‘Keep Your Ear to the Ground’, a monograph on the history of DC punk fanzines for Georgetown University Press, due in 2024.
Jessica H. Grimmer Jessica Grimmer is a performing arts copyright specialist at the Library of Congress and a project archivist at the University of Maryland. She earned her PhD in musicology from the University of Michigan in 2020 with a dissertation titled ‘Political Battlefields in French Musical Education: Provincial Conservatories under the Nazi Occupation and Vichy Regime’, and her master’s degree in library and information studies from the University of Maryland in 2021. Her research focuses on the nexus of music, institutions and political discourse, as well as the sustainability of digital collections, with a special interest in encoded music. Her work has been published in the Music Library Association’s Notes, Journal of Band Research, Journal of Musicological Research and Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology.
Vincent J. Novara is Head of the Acquisitions & Processing Section of the Music Division at the Library of Congress. Prior to this, he was Curator of Special Collections in Performing Arts at the Michelle Smith Performing Arts Library, University of Maryland, where he earned his master of music degree. His work has appeared in such publications as American Archivist, the Music Library Association’s Notes, the Association of College & Research Libraries’ CHOICE and Educational Media Reviews Online, in addition to books such as ‘Archival Description of Notated Music’, published by the Music Library Association and Society of American Archivists in 2021. He has also contributed to workshops and exhibitions, and served as a panellist, presenter or moderator at various conferences
